Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I bet Joyce couldn’t have written the way that he wrote if he’d had to constantly battle Microsoft Word’s idea of what constitutes a proper sentence.

I have managed to make it stop red-lining the words it thinks I’ve misspelled. (You know, those esoteric things like proper names, or the word “blog.”) But the wavy green line under sentence fragments or long — not even run-on, just long — sentences are proving trickier to eliminate.

When you are working to eliminate your inner critic, there’s nothing like a big prissy computer program coming along and spoiling things with its stupid green pen.

This round to you, Microsoft. But the game is far from over.

I’m halfway through my National Novel Writing Month project and I am pretty miserable about it. Naturally, I share this with you.

I read a lot of reconstituted fairy tales and thought it might be fun to do a re-telling of Rapunzel. 32 pages in, I’m realizing that the reason no one ever rewrites the Rapunzel story is that she spends many years trapped in a tower and nothing happens to her.

Well, they do say to write what you know, I think to myself, staring out my apartment windows at the big old world going by outside.

So there’s my crappy plot to deal with. On top of that, the initial ease of prose flow in the first week made me all cocky and I stopped writing for three days, not realizing that by the time I caught up with myself I’d be reduced to describing every piece of fabric in this goddamn boring tower room where nothing ever happens to her. So now I am roughly 5000 words behind my quota.

On top of all this, I have written just about every cliche I know into this story, every sentence clatters and clonks like I’m shaking a box full of blocks, and my character is supposed to be a tomboy but turns out to be a big boring bookworm with nothing to say for herself, just like me.

On the plus side, I gather this is how I’m supposed to feel halfway through the month, so. Yay for me.

National Novel Writing Month begins next week, and I have signed up. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November, beginning at midnight on November 1 and ending by midnight on November 30. You don’t get anything, except 50,000 words you’ve written; there are almost no guidelines; and if you fail, well, no big deal. The thing the website offers is support: online forums to discuss everything from plot points to coffee brands to what to do when you’ve been locked in the bathroom crying for the past two hours (I made that one up), and also in-person groups and meetings and parties.

We’ll see whether my enthusiasm for this project extends beyond this cup of coffee I’m drinking: whether it extends all the way to attending the kick-off party all by myself on Saturday, then talking to a bunch of strangers (but book people, book people), then actually writing a novel in a month. We’ll see.

I am posting this for two reasons. One, some of you might want to try this as well, although some of you (and Jason knows who he is) might be able to write a good novel all by yourselves instead of a crappy novel with 80,000 other people helping.

Two, the site recommends the following:

Tell everyone you know that you’re writing a novel in November. This will pay big dividends in Week Two, when the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who’ve had to hear about your novel for the past month. Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.

Humiliation, here I come.