Nicole Junkerman
Notes
Nicole Junkerman: A Notebook for October 2026
What goes in an October notebook, and what is better left out. An account of a page that gets used rather than admired.
What goes in an October notebook, and what is better left out. An account of a page that gets used rather than admired.
A notebook started in October has a decent chance of surviving. It arrives with the month rather than with the year, so it carries none of the freight a January notebook carries and none of the expectations either. Nicole Junkerman keeps one for each autumn and long ago stopped pretending that the handwriting improves.
The first page stays nearly empty
The mistake is to fill the first page. A notebook that opens with a full column of intentions is one that will be closed politely by the third week. Three or four lines will do: what the month is for, in plain words, and nothing that reads like a target.
The rest of the page is left blank deliberately. Something will happen in the next four weeks that deserves to go there and would otherwise go nowhere.
A page for books, a page for places
Two running pages do most of the work. One holds whatever is being read, with the date it was started and a line about why it was picked up. The reading pace planner handles the arithmetic when the question is whether a long book will fit inside a month.
The other page holds places: a street worth walking again, a room with unusually good light, a corner table that turns out to be better in October than it was in July. The book notes and the travel journal both began as exactly these two pages and never really outgrew them.
Short entries, written the same day
Anything written a week later is a reconstruction. Four lines on the day beat four hundred words the following Sunday, and they are the ones still legible and still true when the notebook is read back in February. Nicole Junkerman writes them standing up more often than sitting down, which seems to help keep them short.
What is left out on purpose
No lists of things not done. No running tally. An autumn notebook that turns into an account of arrears is one that quietly stops being opened, and the entire point is that it keeps being opened. The writing desk makes the same case at greater length.
Reading it back
The real use arrives later. A month of short entries read in a single sitting gives the season a shape that no individual day of it suggested. The books cluster. The walks repeat. Something noticed on the fourth of the month turns out to connect to something noticed on the twenty-sixth, and neither would have been remembered alone.
That is the whole argument for keeping one. Not the writing, which is quick, but the reading back, which costs twenty minutes and returns a month.
October suits this better than most months because it is long enough to be worth recording and short enough to finish. Begin on the first and there will be something to read by the first week of November.
Explore more of the journal: Notebook Method and Writing Desk, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.