When first I began writing The Quiet Proximity, it didn’t even have a name, and I certainly did not realise I was building a world completely governed by distance. I thought I was writing about routines, about the small rituals that hold our lives together. However, the more I explored that idea, the more I found myself returning to the same question: What happens when distance becomes the rule, rather than the exception?

This question became the seed of the Doctrine, the Ministries, the radii, the quiet pressure that shapes every citizen’s life. This was not a world that I sat down to plan, it was a world that revealed itself slowly, through contradictions, through the gaps, and through the things that people weren’t allowed to utter.

Oddly, for writing a novel, the first thing I wrote was not a character or even a scene. No, it was. document.

A dry, bureaucratic document that would eventually become part of the Encyclopaedia. This was the way to explore the world, through systems, and then the people. By putting the people second, I could explore how they can push back against the systems, and that’s when the book began to take shape properly.

In many ways, The Quiet Proximity, is a story about pressure. Not dramatic pressure, but the slow, quiet kind. You know, the kind that builds almost invisibly until, ultimately, something has to give.

The book required patience. The world I had found myself in needed to speak its own voice. It was often clipped, official, and unsettlingly calm. The Encyclopaedia entries grow alongside the novel, each one helping me understand how the Doctrine thinks, how it justifies itself, how it maintains its control.

Now that the book is out in the world, I’m excited to slowly share some of those documents here. Most of them shape the story, but don’t actually fit into the narrative, They are part of the world behind the world.

If you have read the book, I hope the entries from the Encyclopedia deepen your sense of the Doctrine’s reach. If you haven’t yet, I hope they give yo a glimpse of the world waiting for you in The Quiet Proximity.

More soon, Rowan