"Coffee without doughnuts is like a day without sunshine."  Unlucky 13 (Women’s Murder Club, #13) by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro 

Babies are as primed to learn a visual language as they are a spoken one.  That’s the conclusion of research presented February 16, 2018 at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Parents and scientists know babies are learning sponges that can pick up any language they’re born into.  But not as much is known about whether that includes visual language.  To find out if infants are sensitive to visual language, Rain Bosworth, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, tracked 6-month-olds’ and 1-year-olds’ eye movements as they watched a video of a woman performing self-grooming gestures, such as tucking her hair behind her ear, and signing.  The infants watched the signs 20% more than the 1-year-old children did.  That means babies can distinguish between what’s language and what’s not, even when it’s not spoken, but 1-year-olds can’t.  Researchers also watched babies’ gazes as they observed a signer “fingerspelling,” spelling out words with individually signed letters.  The signer executed the fingerspelling cleanly or sloppily.  Again, researchers found the 6-month-old babies, who had never seen sign language before, favored the well-formed letters, whereas the 12-month-olds did not show a preference.  Roni Dengler  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/babies-can-spot-language-even-when-it-s-not-spoken

Nora Roberts (born Eleanor Marie Robertson on October 10, 1950) is an American bestselling author of more than 225 romance novels.  She writes as J. D. Robb for the in Death series, and has also written under the pseudonyms Jill March and for publications in the U.K. as Sarah Hardesty.  Nora Roberts was the first author to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame.  As of 2011, her novels had spent a combined 861 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including 176 weeks in the number-one spot.  She began to write during a blizzard in February 1979 while housebound with her two small boys.  While writing down her ideas for the first time, she fell in love with the writing process, and quickly produced six manuscripts.  She submitted her manuscripts to Harlequin, the leading publisher of romance novels, but was repeatedly rejected.  Roberts says, "I got the standard rejection for the first couple of tries, then my favorite rejection of all time.  I received my manuscript back with a nice little note which said that my work showed promise, and the story had been very entertaining and well done.  But that they already had their American writer.  That would have been Janet Dailey."  Dailey would go on to be embroiled in a plagiarism scandal in which she eventually confessed to stealing some of Roberts' work.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  Subject:  Adverbs that don't end in ly

deasil  (DEE-zuhl)  adverb  In a clockwise direction.  From Scottish Gaelic deiseil (righthandwise), from Middle Irish dessel, from Old Irish dess (right, south) + sel (turn).  Earliest documented use:  1771.

fain  (fayn)  adverb  willingly, gladly, rather.  adjective   pleased, obliged, eager.  From Old English faegen (glad).  Earliest documented use:  888.

piecemeal  (PEES-meel)  adverb  One part at a time; gradually.  adjective  Done in stages.   From Middle English pecemeale, from pece (piece) + mele, from Old English mael (fixed time).  Earliest documented use:  1325.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day
From:  Scott Jordan  Subject:  Adverbs  Your story about encountering Frankly reminded me of one of my favorite lines from the hilarious movie Johnny Dangerously.  A woman asks the protagonist, “Did you know your last name’s an adverb?

From: Nelson  Subject: Fain  Your usage example for the word fain must be read rather than heard in order to be sure of its meaning.  “Now I would fain work, but am unable to”, could just as easily be, “Now I would feign work, but am unable to.”  The latter might be true because the boss is present.
From:  Sam Long  Subject:  piecemeal  There are a dozen or so other “-meal” words listed in Wiktionary, all of them except piecemeal being obscure or obsolete.  For example, inchmeal means “inch by inch”, which is the way an inchworm moves; and pagemeal means “page by page”.

A sophomore slump or sophomore jinx or sophomore jitters refers to an instance in which a second, or sophomore, effort fails to live up to the standards of the first effort.  It is commonly used to refer to the apathy of students (second year of high school, college or university), the performance of athletes (second season of play), singers/bands (second album), television shows (second seasons), films and video games (sequels/prequels).   In the United Kingdom, the "sophomore slump" is more commonly referred to as "second year blues", particularly when describing university students.  In Australia, it is known as "second year syndrome", and is particularly common when referring to professional athletes who have a mediocre second season following a stellar debut.  The phenomenon of a "sophomore slump" can be explained psychologically, where earlier success has a reducing effect on the subsequent effort, but it can also be explained statistically, as an effect of the regression towards the mean.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophomore_slump

Michael Robotham (born 1960) is an Australian-born, internationally published crime fiction writer.  In February 1979 he began a journalism cadetship on the Sydney afternoon newspaper The Sun and later worked for The Sydney Morning Herald as a court reporter and police roundsman.  In 1986, he left Australia and went to London where he worked as a reporter and sub-editor for various UK national newspapers before becoming a staff feature writer on The Mail on Sunday in 1989.  As a feature writer, Michael was among the first people to view the letters and diaries of Czar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, unearthed in the Moscow State Archives in 1991.  He also gained access to Stalin’s Hitler files, which had been missing for nearly fifty years until a cleaner stumbled upon a cardboard box that had been misplaced and misfiled.  The archives also revealed secrets about Rasputin and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.  Michael rose to become deputy features editor of The Mail on Sunday before resigning in May 1993 and accepting freelancing contracts with a number of British newspapers and magazines.  In November 1993 he accepted his first ghostwriting commission, helping Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys to pen her autobiography 'Empty Cradles'.  Published in 1994, it told the story of how she uncovered the truth behind Britain's Child Migrant Program which saw more than 100,000 children sent abroad between 1850 and 1967 and established the Child Migrant Trust to reunite children with their families.  In 2011 'Empty Cradles' became the basis of the film 'Oranges and Sunshine' directed by Jim Loach and starring Emily Watson as Margaret Humphreys and Hugo Weaving and David Wenham as two of the child migrants.  Michael went on to collaborate on fifteen "autobiographies" for people in the arts, politics, the military and sport.  Twelve of these titles became Sunday Times bestsellers and sold more than 2 million copies.  These books included the autobiographies of Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell, British comedy actor, Ricky Tomlinson and sixties musical legend Lulu.  In 1996 Michael returned to Australia with his family and continued writing full-time.  In 2002, a partial manuscript of his first novel, The Suspect, became the subject of a bidding war at the London Book Fair.  It was later translated into 24 languages and sold over a million copies around the world.  His books have since won, or been shortlisted for numerous awards including the UK Gold Dagger and US Edgar Award  Four of Michael's 'Joe O'Loughlin novels' have been turned into TV movies in Germany.  His standalone novels 'Life or Death' and 'The Secret She Keeps' have also been optioned for film and TV projects in the US and UK.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robotham 

Michael Robotham (pronounced ROW-bottom) on writing, crime fiction and writing tips at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB0qieRFA8o  17:10

Elmore Leonard:  The Story-Writing Process  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub_09NgFjrA

6:12

The current population of the United States of America is 326,021,620 as of Tuesday, March 6, 2018, based on the latest United Nations estimates.  The United States population is equivalent to 4.28% of the total world population.  http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1853  March 6, 2018  On today’s date in the year 2000, the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen gave the premiere of a new opera entitled “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on a novel of the same name by Canadian writer Margaret Attwood.  The book and opera tell of a nightmarish future:  following a nuclear disaster in the United States, infertility rates have soared, and a religious sect has staged a military coup, enslaving the few fertile women who remain as breeders, or “handmaids,” for the military and religious commanders of their sect.  Despite its grim subject matter, Danish composer Poul Ruders says he saw "huge operatic potential" when he first read the book back in 1992.  The original production in Copenhagen was sung in Danish, but Ruders says he conceived the work in English.  The opera was staged in that language first in London at the English National Opera, and subsequently, at the opera’s American premiere, in St. Paul by The Minnesota Opera, to great critical acclaim.  Composers Datebook  Thought for Today  Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day. - Gabriel García Márquez, novelist, journalist, Nobel laureate (6 Mar 1927-2014)