selfshiptober is a month-long event for selfshippers all about celebrating the spooky halloween season!

each day of october has two prompts assigned to it.these prompts are used to inspire you to create something for your selfship. you are free to either combine the two prompts together, create something for them separately, or choose just one to create for.

the prompts are broken up into two categories: "shippy" & "spooky", respectively! "shippy" prompts are traditionally, well, shippy! they lean toward fluff, intimacy, romance, and classic soft moments. "spooky" prompts are halloween-themed, often touching on things like horror, the supernatural, and sometimes even angst.

the two prompts offer a fun duality: some people live for the scary side of halloween, whereas others just want some cute scenarios to picture their ships in. this event offers prompts that cater to both audiences. if scarier themes aren't your thing, you can stick strictly to the soft prompts; if you live for halloween horror, however, you can dive headfirst into the spooky track!

feel free to combine both prompts for a single day, or just pick one. you can follow one specific theme for the whole month (such as only doing the "shippy" prompts, for example) or mix and match day-by-day. it's totally up to you!

one thing that differs this event from other monthly events, is that there is no formal "completionist" title, and no rewards for people who manage to crunch in all 31 days. in fact, the event does not technically close until new year's day. while the prompts themselves center around the 31 days of october, i do not expect everyone to grind out that many works in such a short amount of time. participants are not only allowed, but encouraged to post "late" works. i will continue to check the selfshiptober tag and engage with new works until january 1st, making selfshiptober more of an "end of the year" event than an october one. this is in order to discourage stress and burnout, and to promote a more relaxed event environment overall.

hi everyone! long time no see! i hope everyone is well today :)

first things first: selfshiptober 2026 is happening! i am already working on the prompt list, and plan to post it sometime in august, hopefully much sooner than later. this post is just some rambling about light changes (such as minor organization improvements) and addressing my inactivity last year. speaking of ..

since this is an event blog, i do not want to talk about personal matters very much. however, i would be remiss if i didn't address my inactivity last year, especially after kinda-sorta promising to be active, and completely failing to deliver.

as most know, i am the sole moderator of this event, and i suffer with extremely severe, unmedicated mental health conditions -- hopefully they will not unmedicated come this year's event, but they will still be very severe. last year, i left an abusive situation, and have been in depression since. after posting the prompt list, i lost much of my will to be online, and ended up not reblogging (or really even viewing) most of the content made for this event. i am choosing to be so frank about this because i do not want the followers of this event to assume i was being lazy, or that i simply didn't care about the stuff people were making, because that is absolutely not the case. i just have very, very few spoons to throw around, and most of them go to real life stuff. hopefully this year, i will be able to muster up enough energy to add at decent chunk of y'all's stuff to the event archive tag.

thank you all for reading through that slightly personal ramble, and for being so patient with me this last year. i still hope everyone who participated had so much fun with my prompts, and i hope i can make the event even more fun this year!

anyway, speaking of this year's event: what do i plan on changing?

spoiler alert: not much, but there are some slight things ...

i am no longer using gifs in future prompt posts, especially flashing gifs (such as blinkies). in this past year, i have developed a much better understand of how harmful untagged gifs can be for some individuals, and thus, i have decided to opt out of using them for the event all together. the header image for the blog will still be a gif, but there will be no gifs in any of the official event posts anymore.

i will likely still be using dividers and decor images in the prompt post itself, but they will not be gifs, and they will have proper alt text.

i am making a "introduction to the event" post to link alongside all other official event information, instead of attempting to abridge all of the event info in the year's prompt post. i wanna make this as beginner-friendly and accessible as possible!

some slight clarifications to the rules, faq, etc.

EDIT 8/14: i'm also going to be including alt prompts and an image version of the prompt list!

nothing too big, like i said. i just hope to improve the quality of life of this event overall :)