aestheticizing my spaces

I find myself in a new place once again. For someone who prefers to play it safe, I keep finding myself in unfamiliar places again and again. As much as it feels more like anxiety than possibility, I am trying my best to bend the newness into something generative. I'm also overflowing with spaces: two offices at my job and a perfect little office nook at my apartment. For once, I feel like I can compartmentalize my writing. I'll even be able to mostly reserve my laptop for my own writing and keep "work" at work. I've really tried hard to make my personal writing spaces as aesthetically pleasing as possible. It wasn't too hard given that I came back from Germany with a stack full of art postcards. Here's my desk space: 

Since I find it hard to balance critical writing and creative writing and want to find time for both, I really tried to make this space inspirational to both. My sweet spot seems to be modernist surrealism because it hits at the historical/cultural setting of my critical work and the mythological/fantastical of my fiction (still feels weird to claim myself as having fiction). Since I also want to claim my laptop for my own writing, I also created this collage as my desktop: 

It's a bit kitschy maybe but I love thinking about all these women artists as a tradition that I'm joining. And sometimes I downplay my own visuality. Art was always something where I could never match my inner vision with what I created. Writing can feel like that sometimes, but there's an extra layer of signification that makes my inability to fully realize what I wanted less obvious. But a lot of my favorite science fiction and fantasy writing is very visual so I think it's important to surround myself with as much weird visual worlds that I can. Maybe they will seep into my brain and come out my fingertips on the page.