From out of the city of Urm, which is imaginary, there arose in that year a great stink…

But I had no frickin’ idea how much other people would bring to Urm when I wrote that.

Here’s the skinny: a couple of weeks ago, I was noodling about, letting my brain do its thing and playing tug-o-war with my four month old, and losing because new dads always lose games like that. I’d started reading Gormenghast after picking up an old, battered hardback copy in the bookshop in Bridport. And for some reason I had Conan in my head, and Echobazaar and Fallen London, and all kinds of malarky. And I just tweeted it.

Wow.

So you can trace what happened here. But basically it took off a little bit. Not like ‘trending on twitter’ took off, not like ‘Stephen Fry tweeted about it and now the servers are crashing’ took off. But like ‘lots of people got into it and did amazing stuffz with it and it’s still rolling, two weeks later, with basically zero support.’

And Sydney Padua, she of 2DGoggles and general awesome, posted an Urm image.

Which I think is amazing. I talked to the Economist’s Babbage blog – I gather there’s some pissy commentary, but never mind – and to the BBC’s Outrider’s podcast, and what I was saying was:

It’s a group thing, making its own directions, choosing its own shapes and so on. It isn’t a great investment of time by any one person, it doesn’t require that every tweet be a perfect snowflake; it grows in the telling and it lifts itself up by its bootstraps and makes you think, laugh, shudder, feel, and imagine. And that is fantastic.

The way I see it – and it may turn out that I am wrong – Urm is like a webwork where conventional narratives are like a single or braided strand. You may never find out what happens in one storyline because the swirl of life in the city takes you away, just as you never find out whether the two people at lunch at the next table go on a date or murder one another or fight crime and experience a romantic longing they can never fulfil so long as their quest continues.

It is fragmentary, thunderflash narrative, like haiku: a sudden experiential upload in a small space which germinates in your mind and evokes response and sympathetic understanding.

It is a place to leave your nightmares.

It is fun.