Archita Mittra’s story “The Weaver” appeared in our 2022 anthology, “Every Breath Alight.” We were captivated by this futuristic love story that dropped life wisdom, proving that heartbreak and confusion still exists in any world inhabited by humans. The DRP editors thought this story had stayed on our theme of women finding their voices and rising out of the fire.
Archita Mittra is a writer, editor, and artist, with a fondness for dark and fantastical things. Her work has appeared in Tor, Strange Horizons, Zooscape, Anathema Magazine, Hexagon, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart, best of the net, and other prizes. She completed her B. A. (2018) and M.A. (2020) in English Literature from Jadavpur University and has a Diploma in Multimedia and Animation from St. Xavier’s College (2016). When she isn’t writing speculative fiction or drawing fan art, she can be found playing indie games, making jewelry out of recycled materials, reading a dark fantasy novel, baking cakes, or deciding which new tarot deck to buy. She lives in Kolkata, India, with her family and rabbits. Visit her website architamittra.wordpress.com, and Twitter and Instagram @architamittra.
At what point did you consider yourself a writer?
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember but I’ve never really considered myself a “writer.” As far as “creative writing” goes, most of my school years were spent filling the margins of my textbooks with emo poetry, fanfic one-shots and the beginnings of novels. Then in high school, I began volunteering for a local newspaper and climbed the ropes of journalism. Throughout my university years, I extensively published poetry in online literary journals while doing a ridiculous amount of ghostwriting, content writing and editing on the side to support myself. Since I graduated in the middle of the pandemic, the job market then wasn’t really kind to us. So I kept freelancing to pay the bills while publishing both fiction and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies, and I continue to do so, to this day. But since writing stories is what interests me the most, I guess I’ll consider myself a “real” writer if I ever get to a point where I can rely on my fiction sales as a stable source of income which given the publishing industry and general state of the arts does seem increasingly unlikely, haha. But the future is never set in stone, right?
Give us a peek into your writing process. (How often do you write, are you a pantser vs. plotter, is there a time of day you normally write, etc.)
My writing process is extremely chaotic, and it changes depending on the project, my mood, as well as the prevailing circumstances. I usually write whenever I get an uninterrupted stretch of free time which sadly isn’t a lot when you have to balance housework, caregiving, freelancing deadlines and health-related delays, but I usually have my phone or notebook with me to jot down any new ideas or thoughts. I love being both a pantser and a plotter, but I’m more of the latter, preferring to have a rough outline before I sit down to write something (and make most of the precious “free time”). There isn’t a particular time of day I normally write since I wake up each morning with varying energy levels and new challenges to solve. I wish I was one of those people who can just wake up, grab a cup of coffee, sit in front of the laptop and get the words down. Maybe one day!
How do you come up with your ideas? How do you beat writer’s block?
Ideas are never the hard part for me—it’s sticking to a concept long enough to write it down and actually finish it that’s difficult. But in general, I’m inspired by everything around me—be it a conversation with a friend, a view from the window, something on the news, or just something that’s bothering me. I do enjoy reading books, watching movies and series, and playing video games, so I guess all that art inspires and reinvigorates me to create something of my own. I sadly don’t have a surefire way to beat writer’s block, but sometimes the impending pressure of a deadline helps me get something done. Other times, I take a break from that project to work on something else, while waiting for the ideas to percolate into something tangible.
What was the inspiration behind your story featured in DRP’s anthology?
“The Weaver” was inspired by two things—a very messy situationship that I got out of in early 2020 and a conversation with a person who challenged me to write something set in a “cyberpunk” world. I wrote the first draft of the story in mid-2020 and as I look back on it, I realize I was trying to work through my trauma while also putting in my love for urban legends and Creepypastas into the tale. The bit where Lola boards an elevator to meet the mysterious Weaver who might be a god from another age or a powerful bit of holographic sentient code was inspired by a creepy Japanese/Korean ritual called “The Elevator Game” where you find an abandoned building and press the buttons on an elevator in a particular order to travel to a different dimension. The first time I read about it, I felt both scared and exhilarated and I remembered thinking, “Gosh, I need to write a story set around this!”
What do you hope readers will get out of your short story featured in DRP’s anthology?
The cyberpunk genre is often associated with a sense of bleakness, where the tech-corporates have taken over and it’s almost impossible (though certainly noble) for the lone hacker to take down the system. So, at the outset, I wanted my story to end with a ray of hope, no matter how small. And that’s why I focused on the figure of Lola who is disenchanted by the world at large but also specifically by a harrowing break-up—and nevertheless, is able to climb out of that dark hole.
So, I hope I can make readers realize that even if healing from trauma is never easy nor linear, it’s still very much possible—you don’t always need the other party to offer you closure at the end of a toxic relationship and ultimately, you’re the storyteller of your own life, so don’t be afraid to tap into that Main Character Energy! To quote one of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
What do you generally read? Why do you gravitate towards those stories?
I read all sorts of books—be it literary novels, SFF, poetry chapbooks, non-fiction, comics and the occasional TTRPG handbook—though I have always had a fondness for speculative fiction. Fantasy and science fiction are the genres that I feel most comfortable in. As a kid, I grew up listening to fairy tales narrated by my mother and grandmother and making up imaginary friends to talk to and go on adventures with, and I think all of that slowly morphed into an interest in magic and the supernatural in my teenage years. I remember wanting to be a ghost hunter or a cryptozoologist and I was so incredibly excited to get my own tarot deck in high school! I’ve always wanted the real world to be a bit more magical, and I guess that urge led me down a rabbit hole to wondrous worlds in the guise of fiction in general and fantasy stories in particular.
What other creative projects are you working on? How can readers find your other writing (and future writings)?
I have a story set in outer space (but in a similar cyberpunk world) called “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d” coming out in Lightspeed this August. It’s also a love story of sorts, unfolding in a capitalist dystopia and much darker and bleaker than “The Weaver.” I also have a sapphic horror novelette called “The Summoning” detailing the toxic and complicated friendship between two girls attending a boarding school, out in Haunted Hallways, an interconnected dark academia anthology edited by May Celeste, published by Outland Entertainment earlier this year. And I interviewed Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld about the threat of generative AI and its impact on SFF publishing and beyond, in Deep Dream—a timely and remarkable anthology that imagines the future of art, edited by Indrapramit Das, as part of MIT Press’s Twelve Tomorrows series. This one comes out in October 2024 but you can pre-order it now, if it interests you!
I also regularly review the latest SFF books (and the occasional film, video game or web series) for various outlets, including Strange Horizons and Locus Magazine and I’m presently juggling several projects all in varying stages of completion, so if you’d like updates and announcements about my future writings, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @architamittra.