The Devil's Eye by Ox Devere
TPP EP 07

TPP Episode 7 with Parker Jamison (Ox Devere)

Mark: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and you are listening to episode number seven. A quick thank you to the Patreon subscribers supporting this podcast and my books. Your support means a lot and it helps keep the lights on here. And thanks as well to the guests who donated novels, novellas, and short stories that I get to share exclusively with my Patreon members.

If you’re an author and wanna sponsor a future episode, just head to markpjnadon.ca/thrillerpitchpodcast.

Today’s guest is Parker Jameson, writing under the pen name, Ox Devere, author of the Devil’s Eye, an adventure thriller. She was born just outside of Boston, attended film school in Florida, worked in Los Angeles and [00:01:00] returned to her Massachusetts origins to switch storytelling lanes from screenwriting to novel writing.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come on today’s podcast.

Parker: Thank you. It’s very nice to meet you more.

Mark: And we are here today to discuss, I have your book with me here, The Devil’s Eye. All right, we’re gonna jump right into the pitch with the episode, so if you want to go ahead and pitch me your book.

Parker: Okay, well, at a auction in London, a long lost notebook from a legendary, uh, Alchemist, conjurer, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth, I, I named John d surfaces mysteriously and there a rather scandal ridden billionaire snaps it up. And this guy is a, has a fascination for the occult. His name is Mark Pearson. He believes the notebook contains the location of a mystical relic promising to unlock the cosmic [00:02:00] knowledge of God named The Devil’s Eye, and in the hands of the world’s foremost blackmailer, which he is, it would mean complete power. So CIA operative Ridley Samaras, who was uh, the first woman to enter the SEAL training, Navy SEAL training, but washed out for an injury, was later recruited into a clandestine division. She and her division director decipher John D’s encrypted notebook, and it puts them into a serious high stakes hunt across Europe to find this missing artifact before Pearson’s mercenaries do.

So this takes you from snowy streets of Edinburgh, canals of Venice, uh, from Westminster Abbey to the Opera House of Vienna, and they are Ridley Samaras and Booker Douglas are just locked in this blistering race, deadly showdown with, uh, Pearson’s mercenaries. [00:03:00] So as they close in on their target they just had no idea the scale of Pearson’s reach and influenceand it leads them straight to the doorstep of British royalty. And then they have to decide just how much they’re willing to risk in order to take on one of the greatest institutions in the world and one of the most dangerous items they’ve ever encountered.

Mark: That’s great. Thank you. That’s a great pitch.

A fun adventure story. I love that.

Parker: It’s, uh, you know, sort of fans of Clive Cussler, Indiana Jones, James Rollins, little Jason Borner, Jack Ryan thrown in there.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Great mix. So where did this, what inspired this story?

Parker: So it’s funny because this is really back in the news these days in a way I did not expect it to. I had read about Jeffrey Epstein being very fascinated with [00:04:00] futuristic humanism and technology. Like the guy was looking into being cryogenically frozen and he wanted to populate the earth with his own DNA and he was really into MIT research and I thought, what if a guy like that was instead in really into the occult? And what would he do to use all of his wealth and influence to go after items he believed would enhance his power? So that, yeah, it feels shockingly relevant in the last few weeks. Again, I did not see this coming.

But uh, that’s, that was sort of the genesis of the entire story.

Mark: And was there a moment in your life that shaped a plot point or a moment or scene in the story?

Parker: I wouldn’t say so. No. Thankfully, I have not lived through most of the things that these, these characters go through. [00:05:00] It would be a, a very different lifestyle for me. I would probably not be sitting behind a computer. Um, not really. Uh, the travel that I get to do informs my sense of place seen, uh, and what’s possible in a, in a city or a building.

But other than that, I don’t think so.

Mark: Have you traveled to all these places to actually check out some of the scenes that you wrote?

Parker: I wish. No, I’m not really able to do it for every location because as in my first book, I, there are just too many locations. So I go, I try to get to the most pivotal one that I could, could, you know, really absorb the space and for The Devil’s Eye that was going to Scotland.

And I don’t wanna spoil exactly where I went, but it was really essential that I got to see it in person, that I get to map out the space and understand [00:06:00] the building. So.

Mark: Did anything change about the characters? Like when you got there to Scotland and you like, well, not the characters so much, but like the story, did anything change to impact the story when you were there and you’re like, the scope of it or anything was different than you imagined?

Parker: It wasn’t really, I actually plot out pretty comprehensively ahead of time, which probably comes from a background in screenwriting where you don’t have any extraneous stuff, you, you don’t have space to wander. Uh, everything has to be pretty tightly plotted. And I think it may be just informed a little bit of character essence for one of the main characters in this book who is Scottish.

And sort of getting a feel for his land and his people probably helped me flesh him out a bit.

Mark: What character was that?

Parker: Uh, Ian Carnegie. Ian

Carnegie, okay. Mm-hmm.

Mark: So when you started writing the story, I [00:07:00] noticed your process is to outline the whole story, right? It’s, mm-hmm. And then as you’re writing, do you or like, are you meticulously following that outline, or did the characters take over part of the story and change your outline?

Or is that outline just. It’s a flexi outline.

Okay.

Parker: So yeah, it, it’s not made of cement, it’s sort of rubber, uh, when in, you know, there weren’t any serious deviations. And part of that is because I’m, I’m essentially writing a puzzle and so I need to know that all the pieces fit together. So with outside of that, some scenes can change.

But I have to have the completed puzzle because one will lead to another. Mm-hmm. And so if I go in and try to mess with those midway, I would have to shift everything. And thankfully I didn’t have to do that once I got, once I got writing. But in fact, this, this sort of interesting, [00:08:00] I, I had started this and written 25,000 words.

Of a very different book. And I got into it and I realized, this is not the right, this is not the right story, it’s not the right book. And so scrapped it started over, and once I was in the new story, I was like, this is it. This is absolutely the right story to be telling, uh, this is the right book and it feels good.

So in some ways, yes, I scrapped a lot. I changed a lot. But once I, once I had that blueprint I was like, this house is gonna look great.

Mark: Wow. That’s a lot. To cut 25,000 words into a novel and very brave. Was it a near the same story and you kind of like went in a different direction? Or was it just something completely different that you were just like, no, this isn’t the right story to tell?

Parker: It was very different. Mostly the same characters, but it was, it was very different. It was more of a [00:09:00] crime investigation sort of rather than an adventure that I wanted to go on. And I hope that readers enjoy going on. Mm-hmm. Uh, so yeah, the tone was just, it was just wrong because the plot was wrong. And I, I much prefer the, the one I ended up creating.

And I think you really have to find a sense of satisfaction for yourself and having written a story you wanted to write in the end.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So when you, when you’re outlining, do the characters come together at the same time? Because you were mentioning, I know I’ve had stories that where the characters just kind of take over and then the whole book goes in a different direction.

But like you mentioned, which I hadn’t thought about, when you have these puzzles already mapped out and you’ve done all that research and the places and things like certain things have, you know, flexi, but certain things have to happen. So do you, do you end up approaching characters also as part of your outline and having a good idea of who they are and what they’ve been through prior to even starting the novel.[00:10:00]

Parker: Yes. Although they flesh themselves out as I’m going through it and I spend more time thinking their thoughts and being in their head, characters become richer. That’s, that’s sort of what’s. What’s happening a lot now in the book I’m writing, I sort of step away from writing pages and I consider new things and think about what’s going, you know, books just live in your head all the time.

I mean, uh, and I consider new aspects or things pop out to me that. Oh yeah, this, this person is dealing with this internally or from their past, it would inform their attitude toward this. I kind of worked that stuff in the basis of all these characters is pretty fixed, but some of their actions, some of their attitudes, some of their insecurities are fears start to display themselves and work into the [00:11:00] plot. They don’t throw it off course again, but they can flex, flex the boundaries a little bit. Mm-hmm.

Mark: I really enjoyed, getting to know Ridley and I liked it like that she, how real she felt with the start when she was like playing the piano on her date and then she just wanders off to play the piano.

This, I don’t think this is this is a spoiler ’cause this is the first few chapters I’m talking about but, uh, and then we find out about like the accident with the Navy Seal stuff. Uh, and that she, it, it was really interesting that, ’cause I almost always expect in these stories that’s like former special Forces former, super Alpha, you know, strong person.

And then here she actually, although she is strong as we come to know her, but she washed out of, of the Special Forces training. Was that all pre-planned? Like how did you build her as a character?

Parker: Yeah, that, um, she’s sort of an amalgam of some different people. That story of the diving accident was real, I heard it [00:12:00] from a Navy Seal and that always stuck with me. And when I read an article once about the first woman qualifying for the pipeline that leads to BUDS training, which is Navy SEAL training, she qualified for it, which was historic, physically that’s never happened before. But she decided not to pursue that route.

And it just struck me, you know, the most magical writer, writer words, what if? And so I thought, what if she had gotten in and not failed or succeeded, really, but something happened to knock her off course, and it meant she would never know if she would have succeeded. So just sort of some horrible, unfortunate accident which medically disqualified her.

From continuing that training ever becoming a Navy seal out of her control and she would just always carry around this [00:13:00] chip on her shoulder, this wondering if she would have been good enough if she would have succeeded, but she can never find out. And so there’s always this edge of needing to do something greater, needing to prove herself.

And, uh, that that dog’s her, that dog’s her, that really informs her character.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I liked that a lot. Is, was she your favorite character to write or do you, was there someone else that you enjoy even more?

Parker: So Ridley is the main character in the series, which is just a character series.

You don’t have to read them in order. She first appeared in Rage of the Gin, which, which was the first book. She’s back in this, but as much as some of our interests overlap, I’m not very mentally or emotionally like her. There is a character in The Devil’s Eye, Ian Carnegie, who was the easiest for me to write, he felt like my spirit animal to me. He was sort of, he was sort of the soul of the book and [00:14:00] I, I would say mentally, emotionally, I related the most to him. And that was kind of fun because I’m not sure that. I’ve had that when writing books before. I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt that, uh, when, when writing a book, so that that was enjoyable.

And then, you know, no comment about his journey. But, uh, but yeah, I, I really, really liked writing his character and having him involved.

Mark: Ridley stuck out to me because I think, because I have that, I asked those same kind of questions that she asks in the book about, about that. Like, what, what if I had, you know, passed this or done that or made those decisions. So yeah. I do relate to, to her So I just wanna jump back to the research a little bit. When, when talking about research how much of it is real? Like, the one thing that’s striking about this book is as I’m reading it, it’s so well done that I, I’m always stopping to almost wanna do research to be like, is this real?

Did this stuff happen? Are [00:15:00] these people real? I just keep asking myself like, what is real about this book? Because so many things have to be historically accurate because it reads like it is. Although I have no idea, which is why I’m asking the question.

Parker: Yeah, that’s fun. Because I’m a research maniac, I mean, I just end up down the deepest rabbit holes. I probably research too much to get things accurate. I, I have an obsession with getting accurate everything that I can outside of my creative license. So if I get something wrong, I want it to be my choice rather than out of ignorance.

Every place pretty much, except for like secret chambers. Every place that I include is accurate. I watch a lot of GoPro videos on YouTube to get a sense of cities and buildings. A lot of Google maps, a lot of photos. You know, if there’s a cafe that the characters stop into on a street in the city[00:16:00] and they order something off the menu that thing is on the menu at that cafe. Like, it’s absurd. It’s, it’s, it’s a lot. But I love discovering stuff. And so, uh, especially in The Devil’s Eye, there were so many locations that I discovered while researching that made it into the book, and then I would’ve readers.

Say, oh my gosh, I can’t believe this place exists. I looked up photos of it and this is amazing. And I go, I know. I felt the same way when I found it. So I had to, I had to include it. And, and I love that discovery.

Mark: Well, it makes me want to check it out, so I will, I’m sure I’ll be Googling as I continue reading the book to, to check out some of these spots. And even almost as like a travel destinations, it’s almost like research for travel destinations. I get to Oh, it is. I get to do that through your fiction.

Where do I go next? Um, so your book opens, I was curious about, your book opens in, like [00:17:00] 1582, I think in, in London, and you start your book instead of a prologue or instead of using that John D moment as backstory throughout the book, you chose to start it with chapter one. I’m curious as to why you made that decision, because there are like those, essentially those three main ways you could have approached it.

Parker: I like cold opens. I like setting you in a scene that is pivotal and sets off the chain of reactions that the characters engage in. I find that piques my interest the most. Game of Thrones did that really well in the TV series. It was a cold open. They hook you with a scene, where they encounter a monster.

You don’t see, again for seasons, you don’t even know who these people were, but it presented the hook that would get the rest of the story going and matter to the rest of the story. So John D was a really fascinating guy. I’d heard about him, I knew stuff about him in [00:18:00] history, sort of . But I had always thought like, oh, he is an alchemist and a conjure.

Okay. But that’s what they used to call scientists, you know? And so I was like, okay, maybe he was just a scientist. And then I got into researching him and he left copious notes on his own activities. The guy was holding seances like every day, so he was. Real conjure type and he would always use a, a medium, a scryer and so I, I researched, there’s a lot of in detailed research because of how many notes he kept. He believed, he was hearing from the angels that they were giving him the language of Eden and a new alphabet, and he was really into it. So that incident in London that I describe with the sky opening up being red and it just red gashes all over the night sky that actually happened.[00:19:00]

So that is accurate. And the scryer who showed up on his doorstep is accurate and what they did in his study every day is accurate. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, so I just catch it in my net, use it and, and hope that other people are as hooked as I was when I found out about it.

Mark: Wow. Well done.

Yeah, I was wondering about that. Okay, so John d was based on, on a real person who

Parker: Yes. A

Mark: real alchemist or scientist. Yeah.

Parker: Yeah.

Mark: Very cool. Oh, so many questions I want to ask you

Parker: ask away.

Mark: Was there what moment was, scene or moment was the hardest to write, either creatively or emotionally?

Parker: Ooh. There were a lot in this book. To preface it, I’ve heard so many authors talk about how [00:20:00] they have to love all their characters, even the villains, and I don’t believe that after writing this book. Uh, the, the two main characters were very much like Jeffrey Epstein and Elaine Maxwell.

I hate them. And I discovered during writing sort of their chapters, I hated them as much for who they were as that they made me think their thoughts, that I had to write down their perspective, and it made me hate them doubly, and you sort of throughout the book follow a story of a 14-year-old girl who’s a violent prodigy, who gets caught up in their world and their web and uh, yeah.

There was a specific scene involving music with her, um, in the latter third quarter of the book that absolutely [00:21:00] broke my heart to write. Like I kind of teared up, when I finished that chapter, and there is actually a playlist. I do playlist for each book that I host on my website on Spotify. And the piece she’s playing during this scene is on that playlist.

Even when I hear it outside the book now I get, I get a little emotional. So those scenes were, were challenging. Those were hard, and I was so glad when I was done writing any of the villain chapters, I just felt like I needed a brain bath and, yeah. Yeah,

Mark: yeah. Writing villains can be hard because they’re, you know, a villain essentially is the hero of their own story.

Right. So you’re trying to, it’s really tough ’cause you’re trying to tell their side of the story while not. Well, yeah. You like absorb the character. It’s so hard to do. Yeah. Because you’re trying to justify things the way they might justify it, and it is a very icky feeling

Parker: Yeah. For [00:22:00] some of, of the most despicable things that one could do.

Mark: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I could imagine that would be, oh, especially a scene like that would be, would be very hard to write. I can imagine. For sure. So we’re getting, uh, we’re getting close to our wrap up here. I have a couple of questions for you left. The first one goes out to our authors are, that are also listening and is, what advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book?

Parker: Uh, write another one. That’s common advice, but it’s certainly true. You should be, don’t get out of the habit almost. As much for establishing yourself as an author, but also establishing your own sense of discipline and keeping that rhythm in your life. I think also, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m terrible at marketing, so I can’t really give advice.

I can give advice that I’ve heard, which sounds good, but, [00:23:00] um. But I, I think that actually networking with other authors, it’s a, it’s a lonely gig. It’s a very solitary endeavor to, to sit in your brain all day and type. Mm-hmm. But I’ve found, uh, the international thriller writers of, of the conference, ThrillerFest and whatnot, to be some of the most welcoming, encouraging, kind, funny people that, that you could en encounter in a career space. They’re, they’re just outstanding and their friendship and their support, have, have meant a lot to me. So I would encourage people to go invest, socialize, get to know these people, ask for their advice. ’cause a lot of them are further along in their journey and and some of them will extend, you know, very gracious favors to you in the future.

Mark: Yeah, that’s great [00:24:00] advice. The connections. The connections mean a lot. Yeah. And the last question, how can people get in touch with you? How can they find your books?

Parker: I’m on Amazon. On Barnes and Noble, in a few bookstores and libraries around the Boston area. I have just, just published an audio book for The Devil’s Eye, which I thrilled with because the narrator is just a phenomenon.

He’s terrific. If you like Scott Brick, I think he’s sort of the next, the next Scott Brick. So he’s, he’s amazing. Everyone should check him out. I am online at oxdevere.com. I’m on instagram@oxdevere.com. I’m on TikTok, uh, where I run a little fun little thing where I pair books with bourbon according to the flavor and the tone of the book, that seems to be a hit.

So, yeah, and, and again, on the website, each book has its own page, and so it includes [00:25:00] some of the q and a, some of the research questions, some of what’s real and what’s not, and then, a playlist for each book if anyone’s interested in that.

Mark: That’s great. Thank you so much and thank you for the sending the copy, The Devil’s Eye.

It has been a, a great read so far and I will continue to read it and and review thank you so much. If you don’t mind sticking around for a couple minutes after the show, we’re just gonna do a few bonus questions for our newsletter subscribers that just goes out to our subscribers.

Parker: Sure thing. Thanks Mark.

Mark: Thank you for listening. If you’re enjoying the show, you can support the podcast on Patreon and get my novella cognitive breach, along with short stories, novellas, and more from podcast guests. Links are in the show notes. If you feel like this episode, please follow, rate and share it with another thriller fan it makes a big difference for me, and I’ll see you in the next episode when I sit down with TD Severin, author of my current favorite book of the year, a medical thriller Deadly Vision.

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