The Wayward Wormhole - Barbados February 2026 / The Art of the Novella

This essay originally appeared in the January 2000 issue of Imaginary Realities.

In 1999, one of the Armageddon MUD coders, Morgenes, put in a command that has no effect on a player at all. It doesn’t get you gold (or obsidian, in our mud’s case), doesn’t raise your skills, doesn’t open the mystic portal to the realm of Waterdeep, or anything at all like that. Yet it was a change that would end up becoming one of the most popular (and most copied) commands ever on the mud, with at least one thread on our discussion board devoted to lavish praise of it from players and staff alike.

The command was ‘think.’ Its syntax is simple. The player types think ‘Woah, hey, did I just see a coin lying in the road back there?’ and gets this back: ‘You think ‘Woah, hey, did I just see a coin lying in the road back there?’ Easy, no? And at first glance, somewhat pointless.

To explain the immense popularity of this command, one needs to understand that Armageddon MUD is more than role play intensive. It’s role play required, and players who fail to stay in character or interrupt the flow of the vast interactive story that staff and players are spinning together usually mend their ways fast. Or are asked to leave the story, usually not in a particularly polite manner. Armageddon’s had the reputation of having the rudest immortal staff on the net for a long time, and while that’s changed considerably, there are, I suspect, staff members who still cherish that attitude to a degree. Players who aren’t staying in character find out fast that it’s not appropriate, or appreciated, on Arm.

Given this, think has proven invaluable to the players whose actions might be incomprehensible to the staff. If a staff member happens to be monitoring a player, and glimpses a few thinks here and there, they know what’s going on and why, precisely, that crazed Krathi is sitting out in the desert. She’s waiting for a vision, which she might choose to supply of her own accord via think, or with which a staff member might help. Why did that elf suddenly take off running? He thought he saw a mantis, gythka staff in mandible, approaching his hiding place. Think not only helps the player solidify what it is she’s doing, but lets the staff know what’s going on as well.

Beyond that, the command’s entertaining and helps the player flesh out the character. Is he thinking ‘Did that templar just look at me?’ If so, he may scurry back into the Labyrinth to hide from the unwanted attention. Perhaps while that wily gypsy is trying to sell her a luck charm, the player’s sitting there thinking hard on how to sell the gypsy out to the dreaded Blackmoon. Personal beliefs, spiritual beliefs, reactions to other characters – all of these, and more, get played out via the think command in a way they never were before. One of my favorite moments was monitoring a conversation between a pretentious noble and the commoner they were upbraiding, who while keeping their eyes downcast was thinking of the multitude of ways that noble could be humiliated.

I’ve seen other benefits as well. At least one character has accidentally typed talk instead of think, and found themselves saying aloud what’s in their head, leading to assorted and interesting results. It slows down some of the fast typists, who otherwise tend to overwhelm other players with the multitude of their emotes and speeches. Some players use it while sleeping, to create intricate and sometimes lurid dreams. We’ve some plans to tie think into the psionic skills on the mud eventually, though that’s a far and future notion. But the benefit to the role playing of the mud has been tremendous. I’d urge other role playing muds to at least…think about putting this command in.

Jeff VanderMeer mentioned this on Facebook and it got me thinking about it. This is the season when speculative fiction writers (and other genres as well, I believe) start thinking about awards. Nominations for the Hugo and Nebula Awards are coming up. There will be others, such as the Locus and World Fantasy Awards, but for most it’s the Hugo and Nebula, with a small group thinking about the Campbell Best New Writer Award and trying to figure out how to make the most of their two year period of eligibility for it.

Complicating this is the fact that neither award is really very democratic. You can only make Hugo nominations if you’re a member of either last year’s WorldCon or this one. Nebula nominations are made by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, many of whom are hoping to make it onto the nomination ballot itself. In either case you could love the book and want to vote for it, but unless you’ve paid the dough for either a WorldCon or SFWA membership, you’re not going to be able to.

One of the words that gets mentioned around this time is “log-rolling,” the act of exchanging favors, along the lines of “You nominate my novella for a Hugo and I’ll nominate your short story for a Nebula.” Recent changes, such as no longer being able to see who nominated something for a Nebula, are encouraging, but the awards still sometimes seem less about the merit of the work than about the popularity of their author.

Beyond that, people use the power of the Internet as much as possible: blog posts, Facebook mentions, tweets, and so forth, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not so much. Why? Because it works. If it didn’t work, there’d be a lot fewer people doing it, and (imo) the award lists from the past decade would be significantly different. Does that make the award process something you should just opt out of and hope for the best? Well, certainly people have done that in the past (and saved themselves some work in the process), but I’d rather have as a take-away the idea that one shouldn’t despair if you don’t win.

Awards are shiny. Most of us like shiny things. And more importantly, they’re testimony to what we really want: affirmation that someone read and liked our work. That’s the real pellet that keeps us pressing the button marked “Pimp my work”.

It’s hard to know where to draw the line. Factor in, also, that what one person considers acceptable, the next may perceive as a gross breach of etiquette. I like the approach the Codex writers have taken: there’s a discussion thread where people can opt in and say they’re willing to read for the awards as well as a place where people can post pieces for consideration. I appreciate this because it helps me discover some writing that I might not otherwise have found. Here’s what I said on Codex in a discussion about it:

I think it’s certainly possible to go too far in pimping your work, but in my experience, that line is farther out than one might think. This is an area where the bolder people have a definite advantage, and sometimes you have to force yourself to be bold about it. You are the best champion your work has, and you might as well do your duty by it.

It would be lovely if all one had to do was write a good story, but the nature of things is that those who are good about promoting their work go farther than those who aren’t. Promotion’s not a substitute for good writing (in most cases), but it sure helps. My collection wouldn’t have gotten nominated for the Endeavor Award if I hadn’t sent them copies of the book, for example, and while I thought at the time it was a pretty long shot, it ended up being quite worthwhile.

To me the most important point is this – don’t just throw your work out there. If you’re going to be sending people your stuff to read, then do some reading and recommending yourself, and do it based on what you like, what you think is good, or ground-breaking, or worthy of recommendation. In that spirit, I’ll be posting some recommendations in the next few weeks, and hopefully guiding y’all to some excellent fiction that you might not have read otherwise. Please feel free to make recommendations to me in return, either on this post or upcoming ones!