Look and Listen

Biography

I was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. When I was growing up my parents moved constantly. In one hellish year of chaos I went to five different schools in about six months. I moved quite a bit after I grew up, too. And for a number of interesting years I lived in north-central Pennsylvania where my novel, Crosshairs, takes place. Somehow I also managed to get a psychology degree from Temple University. I expected to save the world from sadness by applying and distributing the unfailing verities of psycholgy. Slowly I began to realize that those unfailing principles of psychology had turned into mountains of almost useless gobbledeegook. Through it all, I kept writing. After moving to Florida with my wife, Lee, (who, incidentally, is a certified Braille transcriber) I began to published dozens of suspense stories. For a day job, I worked as a publications specialist for local government. In that capacity, my writing experience expanded to include newsletters, annual reports, press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, audio/visual scripts, and technical documents. My employment experiences, however, have also included being a musician in the Air Force, an upholstery worker for Piper Aircraft, a billing and payroll clerk for a horse blanket company in Philadelphia, a photographer and darkroom technician, and a machine operator in a plastics factory. Crosshairs is my first published novel.

Inspiration

I have never been very adept at vocal communications. My brain and my tongue work much too slowly. When I joined the Air Force out of high school, however, I began writing homesick, lost-love, and very lonely letters. To my surprise, I suddenly discovered that I really could communicate after all -- by writing words on sheets of paper. That discovery led me to try my hand at writing fillers and blurbs for magazines like Readers Digest. Then I wrote some (very bad) poetry. Then short stories for the men's magazines. That morphed into writing confession stories for the women's romance magazines (which I got very good at). Plus some travel and wildlife articles. Then, wonder of wonders, I actually got a job that paid me money every week to write! That's when I started writing all sorts of government documents. When I was no longer writing for the government I tried a young adult biography (which I couldn't sell) about Maria Callas the opera singer/celebrity of the 60s. Then it was childrens' picture book texts (which I still can't sell). And then very arcane short stories for the university journals. (Nobody liked them, either.) Finally I thought, what the hell, suspense novels are fun to read. Maybe I'll try writing one of those. Crosshairs is the result. And my publisher keeps telling me Crosshairs will be released "soon, soon." Despite my wide-ranging writing and employment experiences, however, I still can't talk very well. But I must admit, my writing has improved. -- WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT CROSSHAIRS -- "Crosshairs packs a powerful punch from the first page to the last ... and has more curves than the Pennsylvania landscape in which the novel takes place ... Heitz is a splendid story teller ... my head is still spinning." -- Sgt. Jim Potter, M.A., law enforcement officer for 25 years, graduate of the National Academy of the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, VA, and author of COP IN THE CLASSROOM (www.copintheclassroom.com).