I have recently decided that one of the best uses of my time on here — besides liking cat photos, which is also valuable — is to recommend the writers and creators on here. Here is the rough mission statement:

"Substack is supposed to be a village, not a numbers game. So every week I'll be genuinely recommending the talent I find on here — because this isn't Suckupstack, and if I'm putting my name to it, I mean it.

If someone does this for you, consider doing the same for another creator. No pressure. No seven-day curse. Just give what you'd want in return.

If you want to understand more about why you've been tagged here, please see the attached article. And by all means, if there is some reason you do not want to be promoted here please let me know — I won't be offended if you untag yourself."

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This week I am recommending 2 writers who I think you should be subscribing to and here is why

Melissa "TTP" McGuckin

I stumbled across Melissa by accident, read two of her pieces and smacked the subscribe button like I was channeling Snoop Dogg on The Voice. Not just because she has the literary power of transformation — flipping the everyday mundane into something resonant and significant in a few sentences — but because she's something rarer than dodo eggs, especially in this cray six-fingered digital world. She is utterly fucking herself and it shows.

Case in point: in a recent piece she wrote a piece that opens mid-thought, slightly bleary, moves into something genuinely insightful about projection and hurt. It goes from the personal to the benign. You feel the full weight of it precisely because she doesn't stop to explain. All of this makes perfect and relatable sense.

Her material is honest and real, but she pitches the balance perfectly — radical vulnerability without ever verging into self pity. And please don't misread that, she is not a sympathy harvester. An instinct for emotional pacing is a deeply underrated skill, and Melissa has it in spades. What could read as trauma dump instead becomes mutually therapeutic, held together by load-bearing humour. She's something of a traumformer, if you will. (It's a word. Shut up.)

Subscribe to Melissa "TTP" McGuckin because she's earnest, funny and tonally gifted.

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Next up is Words about things and stuff

Something we don't talk about enough is the mastery of economy. Writers are good with words, and we love to show off our wordy McWordsmith skills — which is fair enough, you got it, flaunt it. But something altogether more challenging is achieving the same substance with restraint.

One such example is a piece he wrote about a man who cannot be executed. The state keeps trying. Every Thursday at 4:00 PM. For nine years. Each line is a single flat fact, and somehow that restraint makes it more disturbing than any amount of description could. By the end you're not sure if what you just read was a horror story, a parable or a dark comedy. Possibly all three. The piece is barely 500 words long. For comparison, my average text message is 11billion words long.

He also never tells you how to feel. He drops you in, gives you the facts, and leaves you to arrive where he needs you to. That unspoken trust is a gem of a thing.

As an added bonus, he posts medieval pictures most days which is, in my humble opinion, some of the finest art in history.

If you want somebody who has honed the skill of between-the-lines storytelling, follow Words about things and stuff