As promised, here’s my home desk.

For starters, I love my desk so much. It’s big and bulky and dark wood. Incidentally, I have found two people who share the same desk – one of which being my best friend. It was originally my grandfathers, and he gave it to me before he passed away. There are secret compartments behind the drawers where I like to think he hid presents for my grandmother.

Top: IKEA clock (which I never wound, but I thought was cute), tiny toys (good luck cat and mini typewriter from my friend Colure; shell turtles from my friend Katie; Chun Li, Harley Quinn, and Joker action figures from my friend Hunter), The Ataris CD (I listen to high school pop punk when I need writing inspiration-seriously) moving calendar (because that’s important), mask from my trip to Venice, Little Prince figure from my trip to Paris, cube of Jewish phrases that used to belong to my grandparents, old camera, pile of old books*.

Drawers: A ton of random things, including four filled moleskin notebooks, circus greeting cards from Michaels, my letter from my agent(!!!), stamps (because I still mail letters), post-its, and a golf ball that almost hit me in the head when I was 16. I keep weird things.

Desk: Penguin mug from London (S got me The Big Sleep because we met while reading that book in class-awwww), notebook, hard drive, camera, post-it with my to-do list, laptop, pile of edits.

And because I love it, my cork board beside my desk has a mess of things, including: buttons, a Helga Hufflepuff card, a picture of my puppy Jetta, photostrips of my mom and I and my friend Meg and I from the day I bought my wedding gown, bookmarks, drawings from my friend Shannon, a picture of S and I, and a bookmark from a haunted ship (yep).

And here’s the wall above my desk:

I like to frame random things, so here you go. Clockwise from top: painting from Florence, a print that says Hope, a photograph of my great aunt and uncle**, a postcard from Papa Please Get the Moon for Me***, a painting from Venice, a print my friend Shannon got S and I of two owls reading.

* – Books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dick Tracy, The House at Pooh Corner, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Peter Pan, Through the Looking Glass.

** – Photo: My Great Aunt Faye and Great Uncle Julius were flamenco dancers in Spain. It was a Huge Deal because she was just a little Jewish girl from Brooklyn who followed her heart to another country for a guy. First interracial marriage of my family! The story ended well, though, because they were married until he passed away (when I was in 5th grade). She passed away when I was a senior in high school, and it broke my heart. She was such an amazing woman. In the end, she left me her rings, which are now my engagement and wedding bands.

*** – Postcard: There’s an ongoing joke in my family that my dad will do anything for me. So when he (willingly!) went with me to an Eric Carle exhibit, he bought me the postcard because, yeah, if I asked for the moon as a child, he would have done his best to get it.