A book in the Dancy Flammarion series, 2006

I cannot now recall where or when or why I first conceived of Dancy Flammarion. But then I can say the same thing about almost all of my characters, regardless of how fond of them I may (or may not) be. Almost inevitably, that moment when they initially occur to me is lost. Only later, after a story or two, after a novel or three, do those original thoughts take on any significance, and by then it's too late and I've forgotten. Hindsight's a bitch.

But the earliest mention of Dancy in my notes for Threshold is dated September 16th, 1998. I describe her simply as a "creepy little 'Boo Radley' albino girl." Also, I know that I first came across the name Dancy that summer, while I was collecting fossils from the Upper Cretaceous of western Alabama. If you look at a map of the state-if you look very closely-you can probably find the "town" of Dancy on State Highway 17, a few miles east of the Mississippi line in southern Pickens County. It had a post office, once upon a time, and might have been named for Dr. Edwin C. Dancy (b. 1810). I was there one blistering afternoon in July or August, and the name stuck in my head, as names often do, and so maybe it's fair to say that's where Dancy Flammarion began.

Now, more than eight years later, I've written a novel, four short stories, and a novella about Dancy, though I'd genuinely never intended to go back to her after finishing with Threshold. But in the summer of 2001, while compiling material for Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, I was glancing through the novel and lingered on this passage from the end of Chapter Eight: