Welcome to my new blog, Escape from Happy Valley, about progress on my new book.
I'm a Sci-Fi Historian living in California, with degrees in Journalism, Art, and Art History. I served as Editor-in-Chief of my college newspaper, where I earned three news writing awards for my trial coverage of the campus cop caught stealing parking meter money. Matt McCaffrey, former SRJC Chief of Police, wrote a letter commending my "fair, balanced, and objective" news articles covering the scandal he exposed in his department.
Escape from Happy Valley will be about growing up from my Mormon childhood in New York, Utah, Idaho, Sweden, Alabama, and back to Utah. If you've watched Napoleon Dynamite, it was filmed in the same valley where I grew up and became an Eagle Scout.
My father, Victor W. Jorgensen, Jr., got a Lifetime Achievement Award from NASA. The Utah Historical Society gave him an award for his article in the Winter 1980 Utah Historical Quarterly, The Taylor-Cowley Affair and the Watershed of Morman History, co-written by professor Carmen Hardy at Cal State Fullerton. The two later published Solemn Covenant, about "post-manifesto" polygamy in Utah, and Hardy acknowledged my father as co-author in the foreword. Because he lived in a small Utah town, my father kept his name off the book despite 20 years of research. He was later excommunicated by the Mormon church.
Research will be thorough and interviews will be extensive, and updated here. I want to thank Sgt. Guido Tiberius for all his years of encouraging for my writing.
Crowdfunding details for publishing Escape from Happy Valley, as e-book, paperback and limited hardbound, while be posted and updated here after the writing phase winds down.
