From Little Acorns Do Mighty Horns Blow

There's a video I'd like you to watch.  It's not terribly long at close to seventeen minutes, and once you get the general tenor of it (no pun intended), don't feel as though you have to watch the whole thing.

Just imagine it: you're walking to your apartment building or along a quiet, snowy trail, and then from nowhere, this booming horn sound hits you.  Not just for just a few seconds, but a few minutes.  Bizarre, isn't it?  Even creepy.  I personally don't believe that it's a prophetic sign of any variety, but it's definitely an odd phenomenon.

Two years ago, I was pointed to this clip by James L. Paris's friend and colleague Robert G. Yetman Jr.  I'd worked with Bob on several projects in my professional career, and I'm proud to call him a friend.  He's a U.S. Army veteran, published writer, self-defense expert, former investment manager, and a lot more.  I interviewed him on Poisoned Eden some time ago, and was pleased to be able to ask him, in all seriousness, "Can you give us any investment strategies for dealing with the Zombie Apocalypse?"

The video fascinated me, and when I moved on from Poisoned Eden to write novels, I incorporated the "strange trumpet sounds" phenomenon into The Blessed Man and the Witch.  This wasn't an idea shoehorned in: the Book of Revelation describes seven angels winding trumpets at the end of the world.  I just took the idea and altered it.  I turned Gabriel's Trumpet into an actual person: the Herald of Armageddon.

Without this video, there probably would have been no Blessed Man and the Witch (or BMW, as writer R. M. Huffman has referred to it).  At the very least, it would have been in a much different form.  So thank you, Bob: you gave me the acorn from which this trilogy tree is growing.