“In 1993, [my wife] and I vacationed together in Tahiti. I remember reading a book called “The Doomsday Conspiracy,” by Sidney Sheldon. Up until this point, almost all my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I’d read almost no commercial fiction at all since “The Hardy Boys” as a child. The Sheldon book was unlike anything I’d read as an adult. It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read. The simplicity of the prose and efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my schooldays, and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a “thriller” of this type one day. This inkling, combined with my musical frustrations at that time, planted the seed that perhaps I could write books for a living.”, Dan Brown

So we have Sidney Sheldon to blame….