Jim HeathJim Heath started his career in applied mathematics. But his passion was for writing. Non-fiction writing gradually took over his life. He has published books and long articles on the security of oil supplies, electronic encryption, dog psychology, the inside story of debt collection, insect pests, water supplies, and more. But he mainly writes things for others: technical text, ghostwritten books for people, and very persuasive marketing material for businesses. He and his wife have travelled widely and have lived in seven countries. They now live permanently in Perth, Australia. They both have dual Australian-British nationality. Jim first worked in Perth as the Editor on a 4000-page writing project for Woodside's North Rankin Joint Venture. He was in editorial charge of 22 engineering writers. This led in stages to complex writing projects for all the biggest mining companies in Western Australia and many of their suppliers. Contacts from those projects and from the web led to other non-fiction projects (some on-line samples follow). For more details about the corporate work, see Viacorp. Some publicationsJim's first little book was a best-seller (in Australian numbers): The Fly in Your Eye -- about the pesky bush fly. Hard facts, jokes and cartoons. The book has been out of print for years, and here is a free on-line replica. The Scout Report for Science and Engineering found the book and said this about it in their May 1998 newsletter:
His second book was the lowdown about debt collection. A lot of it came from behind the scenes: straight from lawyers, court officials, private investigators and debt collectors -- talking informally and bluntly. There were two versions: one for Western Australia, and one revised for the laws in Victoria, Australia. They are long out of print and the Victorian edition is now on the web: The Debt Book. Reader's Digest Book Division saw the fly book and asked Jim to help them write a kind of mini-encyclopaedia of hard and somewhat haunting questions: Why in the World? It's full of questions like "Why does wet sand look darker than dry sand?" and "Why does leadless petrol cause such a smell?" They gave him a list of questions (including those two). His assignment: find the answers and write them in the Reader's Digest style. As an experimental chapter for a book about Perth, Jim wrote: All about the water supply in Perth, Australia. It was put on the web and won a Pick of the Net Award. That was followed by a 49-page survey for some corporate clients: How electronic encryption works -- a survey on secure email and private electronic data . Viacorp needed to send and receive some very confidential material: contract-submission documents with values in the hundreds of millions of dollars, industrial methods that hadn't been disclosed yet, arbitration documents in disputes over technical matters, early drafts of annual reports, and on and on. When Viacorp's clients started using email, Jim found himself suggesting encryption systems that could be relied on. Few clients had any ideas on the subject themselves. He used the Survey to help people understand the background and what they're doing when they encrypt and decrypt messages. Other on-line publications about Perth: The security of petrol and diesel supplies in Western Australia and Tips on choosing a suburb in Perth and Why it's hard to have a good-looking lawn in Perth. Jim has also ghostwritten non-fiction books. One of these is now on-line: Dead Fish and Fat Cats. How Canada lost most of its fishing industry. And he has recently written another book of his own, available from Amazon: Your dog is watching you.
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