Natasha Duncan-Drake's Blog, page 24

Recipe: Turkey and Black Pudding Potato Topped Pie

This is a recipe I made up last night and it's based on my mother's shepherds pie - although, in our house, that just means it's mince based and topped with mashed potato - it has no bearing on if it uses lamb, beef or whatever :).

Not fond of or can't get black pudding?
Now if you don't like black pudding or it's just not something you can lay your hands on, you could just sub in more mince, but I would recommend adding another stock cube and a dash of something like Worcestershire sauce to ad...

The Horror of Shakespeare #4 - Is This a Dagger I See Before Me

Every day in October I will be posting a horror/paranormal drabble (100 word story) inspired by a Shakespeare Quote. 

Another literal interpretation :) and today we have vampires! You knew we were going to get to vampires, right?

The Horror of Shakespeare #3 - How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth

Every day in October I will be posting a horror/paranormal drabble (100 word story) inspired by a Shakespeare Quote. 

This is most definitely a literal use of the prompt, not a metaphorical one

The Horror of Shakespeare #2 - Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

Every day in October I will be posting a horror/paranormal drabble (100 word story) inspired by a Shakespeare Quote.

I feel I should remind everyone at this point that I did not promise I would not butcher the intent of the original quote

The Horror of Shakespeare #1 - To Be or Not To Be

Every day in October I will be posting a horror/paranormal drabble (100 word story) inspired by a Shakespeare Quote. Of course, I had to start with the most obvious one.

To Be or Not To be
To be or not to be, or rather, to manifest or not to manifest—that was Miranda's conundrum. On the one hand it would be really fun to scare the mortals, on the other, ghost hunters were a pain in the proverbial.

The rules were very clear: frighten the mortals all you like, but never, under any circumstances, g...

My Top 50 Vampire Movies

My Top 50 Vampire MoviesSo it's not a secret I love vampires, I also collect vampire films and have lost count how many I own. However, I do know which ones I really like, so I thought I would share. I have a very simple system for rating films which has nothing to do with quality or ground breaking film making - it's just how much I want to watch them again :).

Synopses taken from IMDB - unless I thought they totally missed the point ;)

Here are my top 50 vampires films (titles are links to Wi...

Flawed Design by Natasha Duncan-Drake #SciFi #FreeFictionFriday

Free Fiction Friday Flawed Design by Natasha Duncan-Drake August has been and gone, far too fast in my opinion, but there we are, which means we have reached the first Friday in September. The kids are back at school, the weather is turning just a little bit chilly and it's Free Fiction Friday!

Every month we give away a free short story to all the lovely subscribers of our Wittegen Press Newsletter.

It's very easy to subscribe and it's totally free and spamless - I promise. In fact mostly the em...

Resources for Artists & Content Creators

I use resources from all over the internet to create covers and graphics, and to teach myself new techniques. These are some of the best sites I have found and used for completely free photos, fonts, textures, vectors, clipart, tutorials and more. Be warned - I thought I had kicked my font problem until I found DealJumbo ;).

Some have thousands of things, some just a few, but they all have something useful. I hope others may find them useful to.

If anyone has any to add, please do comment - alw...

Cover Composition - The Rule of Thirds and The Golden Ratio

 Cover CompositionThe Rule of Thirds and The Golden Ratio
We all know the adage, don't judge a book by its cover, but we all do! The cover is what grabs the reader's eye, especially in this age of the Internet, when you make have even less time to snag a reader as they scroll down Amazon or Smashwords, than while they wander through a book shop.

I design my own book covers, mostly because I enjoy it and, now that I am on Wattpad, it's kind of important because even fanfic needs a cove...

Comments Recently Not Appearing

This is just a shout out to let people know, I am so sorry if you commented and it had not yet appeared.

I had asked Blogger to email me when comments require moderation (had to turn it on because of changes they made), but it wasn't telling me about them.

I have just been through and moderated all comments - so hopefully it won't happen again!

Now I can go through and reply. :D