I think this is the first photo challenge I’ve done from the prompts on Word Press — for this blog, anyway.  This is my office in an unnatural state: picked up.  When they announced the prompt, I got inspired to actually put stuff away.

My office is tiny, but it’s all mine.  Originally, we used it as a breakfast nook, but when my daughter was born, it became the nursery.  Once she was big enough to climb out of her crib, I gave up the back bedroom for her and moved into the nook.

Two years ago, we had a desk built it.  It has six filing drawers (four of which are full of cemetery stuff).  I chose the color of the walls and the project boxes, then painted everything myself.  The built-in corner shelves are kind of a work in progress, but the left side shelves are all nonfiction: blogs, travel notes, my memoirs.  The right side shelves, which you can’t see in this picture, are the fiction:  As Above, So Below; The Dangerous Type books, and the Alondra books.

That lovely piece of “stained glass” in the window was painted by Suzanne Dechnik, one of the contributors to Morbid Curiosity magazine.  It’s acrylic on glass and called “Death and the Maiden.”

Below that, you can see a little gargoyle peeking out.  That’s the first award Morbid Curiosity won, dating way back to Death Equinox ’98.

The other telling detail of my office is that you can see five to-do lists in this picture.  There’s my daily list, my weekly list, two relating to my blogs, and the list of essays I need to submit this month.  If only writing things down got them finished faster.

I really like my office when its tidy and minimal like this, but it never stays that way.  Really, all it needs is for me to write tomorrow’s Cemetery of the Week.  Then the desktop will be covered with opened books, miscellaneous printouts, random ephemera, and vintage postcards.  I’ll write until I fall into bed, and all the flotsam will lay there until I make time to tidy up again.

As I was writing this, my muse came by to sit on my notebook.  This is the Lady Nocturne, serving as a paperweight.

Nocture, my muse

You can participate in the Weekly Photo Challenges, too.  Here’s the link back to this week’s challenge: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/room/.