Carissa Orlando: Letting the Story Tell Itself
Carissa Orlando has a doctorate in clinical-community psychology and specializes in work with children and adolescents. In her “day job,” Carissa works to improve the quality of and access to mental health care for children and their families. Prior to her career in psychology, Carissa studied creative writing in college and has written creatively in some form since she was a child.
It was only a matter of time before Carissa, an avid horror fan for much of her life, merged her understanding of the human psyche and deep love for storytelling into a piece of fiction.
In this post, Carissa shares the what-if question that inspired her novel, discusses how she let the story tell itself (despite being a planner), and more.
Carissa Orlando (photo credit: Cameron Massey)
Name: Carissa Orlando
Literary agent: Katherine Odom-Tomchin and Sharon Bowers at Folio Literary Management
Book title: The September House
Publisher: Berkley
Release date: September 5, 2023
Genre/category: Horror
Elevator pitch for the book: A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I wish I could say that my inspiration behind this novel was something profound, but that is so rarely how I operate. Instead, the inspiration came when I was standing in front of my mirror, getting ready for work. I was struck with the simple thought: “What if someone lived in a haunted house and was completely fine with it?”
The idea stuck with me and started taking shape over the next several weeks, evolving into the story it ended up being—a tale of a woman, Margaret, who has found a way to live (somewhat) peacefully in a very haunted house. Despite the horrors. And the dangers. And the disappearing husband.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The story itself came out of me fairly quickly. I had the initial idea in the early fall of 2019 and started writing before the year was out. I had a first draft finished by approximately March of 2020 (just in time for the pandemic to hit!), edited into something readable, and started sending out queries in the summer of 2020. The querying process lasted about a year, and I was picked up by my wonderful agents at Folio in the summer of 2021. They helped find the book a home at Berkley just a few months later, and the book will hit the shelves in September of 2023!
This story has evolved quite a bit from the silly single-sentence idea I had while getting ready for work one day into the book it is now. The meat really filled in around the bones, and—thanks to my lovely characters—ended up telling a much more complex and rich story than I ever could have imagined.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The most surprising thing thus far is just how many steps there are to the publication process in general. As I mentioned earlier, The September House found its home at Berkley towards the end of 2021, and my friends and family were all a little confused to hear that it wouldn’t be out on bookshelves until the end of 2023.
It all makes sense now: That time is filled with countless little steps along the way—revisions and copyedits and proofreading and more proofreading and formatting and re-formatting and decisions upon decisions upon decisions! All sorts of people put their brains and eyeballs onto the thing to be sure that, once it is out in the world, the book is as close to perfect as it could be, all the way down to the formatting of the chapter headings.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
This might not be a surprise per se, but it was very fun and rewarding to watch the book take opportunities to write itself. I’ve always been a bit of a planner, and I usually won’t start writing a project until I have a fairly comprehensive outline.
While this one still had an outline, I gave myself a bit of freedom, and it was fun to watch things evolve in the moment, let the characters tell me how they would handle a situation, and allow tiny writing choices to turn into meaningful aspects of the story. It also helped me, when it was time to start my next project, not feel so beholden to the outline and, instead, be willing to see where the story wanted to take itself.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
If you see a gorgeous, well-maintained Victorian house on the market for a surprisingly low price, maybe check for bodies.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Just write. Put words on a page. It doesn’t matter if they’re the right words or the wrong words, well-spoken words or barely-articulate words—just put them on the page. Writing is like playing a sport or learning a musical instrument—you only get better at it the more you do it. Besides, it’s much easier to go back and edit existing words than words that haven’t been written yet.