Lectures and Articles

Quote of the Day

On this site:

• Naming Your Characters

• Drinks from the French Table

• Russian Things That Are Not.

Appearing Elsewhere:

• "A Crash Course in French for (American) Writers." The Love Letter, Newsletter of the San Antonio Romance Authors, 2002.

• You might consider this essay my one-person protest against the random misuse and widespread butchery of the French language. Not that I count any of my possible readers among the perpetrators. Rather, I deliver this article as a preemptive strike against further crimes, so that you may carry the torch of linguistic wisdom.

  
  
  
  
• "The Name Game." Presented at the monthly meeting of the San Antonio Romance Authors, October 2003.

• What are names? How can you chose something if you don't know it? That's where the problem is, and that's why we are so often stuck when it comes to picking a name for a character, or for the town where they live.

  
  
  
  
• " Russian Personal Names: Name Frequency in the Novgorod Birch-Bark Letters."

• It's all well and good to have access to historical documents, but someone needs to interpret them. Well, I went through these and I tried to see what names seemed to be popular in medieval Russia. Oh, and I also tried to make the article readable.

  
  
  
  
• "Folklore and Folk Tales." Trinity University, Fall 2003.

• What is a folk tale? How do folk tales differ from literary fairy tales? Why shouldn't all folk tales be called fairy tales?

  
  
  
  
• "Women in Russian History." Trinity University, April 2004.

• Myths and realities about women's lives throughout Russian history.

  
  
  
  
• "Secret Admirer"

• Book reviews, The Love Letter, Newsletter of the San Antonio Romance Authors, 2003-2005.