It’s been a while since I’ve shared with you where we’re headed. The next few months will bring some interesting New Florence posts, and here’s what you can expect between now and the end of the year:
I’m going to write a dozen or more original short nonfiction posts that draw on what I’ve written here since December 2022. There will be some new synthesis and integration, and an effort to make the insights from psychology, culture, and other fields more and more accessible.
As I write these fresh pieces, I’ll be assuming that what I’ve been posting here is true — about psychology, culture, history, democracy and freedom, science, and spiritual development. I’ll also be assuming the key insights in my novels to be true — especially the insights gleaned by four generations of psychologists in the Evans-Calderon family.
The first three novels focused on the insights into the human soul, psyche, and consciousness from psychologists Otto Rank, Abraham Maslow, Roberto Assagioli, Arthur Janov, and Stanislav Grof. And insights we can glean from a wide range of cultural figures since Dante in the 1200s, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Louis Armstrong, Sinclair Lewis, Friedrich Holderlin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and John Denver.
I’ll write about a few more novelists and a few more musicians. And I expect to do three or four more interviews with other Substack writers.
As mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be teaming up with novelist, essayist, and poet Felix Purat of Poland (via California) three more times. Starting July 5, we’ll have five posts about leading GenX writer Dave Eggers. In August, we’ll each have one post about Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. And in October or November, we’ll have a series of posts about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
(The second novel tackled the psychology of Fascism and the third novel will tackle the psychology of Communism. These were the two great saboteurs of the 20th Century not only of democracy and freedom but of self-actualization and optimal development of the human being across the lifespan.)
There will only be a few more posts from my third novel, Above All Shadows Rides the Sun. Since March, I’ve posted almost everything I’m going to post from it.
The third novel is set from 1968 to 1975, so we’re on our way to leaving that era behind and moving forward into the 1980s and 1990s — in psychology, music and other cultural works, the arrival of democracy and freedom in much of the world, and intellectually, with a special focus on integrated science that includes the Zero-Point Field, zero-point energy and information fields, and consciousness.
These past 11 weeks or so I’ve been working again — almost every day — on the fourth novel. (There will be a fifth novel set in the decade of the 2000s and then I’ll turn back to nonfiction for the rest of my life.) Basically, I have a first draft of the chapters set from 1986 to 1989 and still have to write the chapters set from 1990 to 1995. So a few months to go till I complete a first draft of the whole novel. I expect to bring it out in June 2025.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been posting less often the past few weeks, and I plan to continue that — just 6 or 7 times a month.
Thanks for your “likes” — which do motivate me — and for participating in the discussions in the comments section. If you haven’t yet, you’re invited to participate in the dialogue — to participate in our New Florence community.
Whether you’re a participant in discussions or not, whether you encourage me by pressing “like” or not — even if you’re one of the dozens of subscribers who’ve never made yourself known to me — thanks for sharing in this journey. Thanks for ambling along this road toward the New Florence.
All my best,
Mike
Lots for us to look forward to!
Looking forward to it, Mike! xo