Frederic (Fritz) Martin was born in Iowa, grew up in Western New York, and lived and worked in Maine, Idaho, and California, finally settling in Vermont where he now lives and writes. As an undergraduate at Colby College, he studied studio art, music, creative writing, philosophy yet wound up with a degree in Physics. At U.C. Santa Barbara as a Physics grad student in scientific instrumentation, he discovered the world of sensors and worked with other graduate students examining the amazingly diverse array of senses that ocean creatures utilize to communicate and survive. Along the way, he jack-hammered concrete, worked as a mechanic, delivered papers, rowed dories as a guide on the great western rivers, hitch-hiked everywhere, and read a lot. He married and raised a son and a daughter with his wife Betsy, settling into a career as sensor engineer designing sensors for robotics and autonomous vehicles. He never stopped reading and writing, and published his first work in 2018, winning the Vermont Writer's Prize for his short story "Maybe Lake Carmi". The novel "Not Alone" is his debut novel and the first novel of the Vox Oculis series, a series that challenges us to imagine what human senses might exist or may have existed in our evolutionary past and have since been lost or become carefully guarded secrets.