Do you want to know, do you want to read

8x what you didn't know about your favorite author

Well, I don't know if Dan Brown is your favorite author (Salman Rushdie called his books so pathetic that bad books looked good in comparison), but he is your guilty pleasure, the king of cliffhangers. Moreover, the weather is going to be exceptionally bad this weekend and he has a new novel out, so the chance that you'll be lying on the couch with Dan is considerable. Enter a list of things you didn't know and didn't expect. Lists are fun after all.

1. By accident

Dan never dreamed of a career as a writer. In fact, he was ‘in’ music. He once made cassette tapes (that was indeed in the time of the Bakelite phone) with children's songs, then produced a number of albums (one of which was called ‘Angels & Demons’, the title of one of his later novels that was published here as ‘The Bernini Mystery’) and then continued as a lyricist. But rap came in and Dan was out of a job...

2. And then, and then, and then

Then Dan went on vacation to Tahiti (yes, one of your dream travel destinations). There he lay on a beach bed and found a novel by Sidney Sheldon, ‘The Doomsday Conspiracy’, which inspired him to his own series of novels.

3. Hard worker

Dan Brown is estimated to have a fortune of 125 dollars, but that seems extremely low to me. He has sold 200 million books (at least a euro per book), has been paid for the film rights, and undoubtedly enjoyed all sorts of other lucrative collaborations. But well, he's doing well, shall we say. In fact, he doesn't have to work another day, but he works every day. Even on Christmas. I told you, right? Every day.

4. Quite peculiar

Dan also gets up at 4:00 AM. That's what all ridiculously successful people do, and this too. And then he goes writing. And does push-ups every hour. To stay fresh. And fit. That too.

5. And tsss

Our Dan sometimes suffers from writer's block. But he has his solution for that. Dan hangs upside down. With weights on his feet. Then it starts flowing and a new intrigue comes his way. Rosie O'Donnell seems to do this too.

6. This is fun

Dan lives with his wife in New Hampshire and, as lovely as it is exactly as you would hope and even better, the house has all sorts of secret passages and hatches and rooms. You enter his writing room by pressing a button next to a painting. That painting turns out to be a door to his magical room.

7. A bit about his wife

Blythe had an important job in the music industry. When he started writing, she became his manager. She plugged him as the new Billy Joel or the new Paul Simon of literature. She is twelve years older than he is, one of the reasons they don't have children together. Something Dan Brown often says he is more happy about than sad.

8. Puzzle freak

As a child, Dan was already obsessed with puzzles and codes. His parents, who had three children, often made a treasure hunt with things the children had to decipher. Dan was always the first to finish and loved it. Furthermore, his father was a scientist and his mother strictly religious. Every detail has contributed to perhaps not the best writer of this time, but certainly the most successful. In 2004, he had four books on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Anyway. His latest book ‘Origin’ is now in stores. Shall we buy it together, see who finishes it first and tell what we thought?