And, as it turned out, by the time In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers was in print, I'd already written a second Dancy story, a strange little piece about her childhood in the swamps of Okaloosa County, Florida. Titled "The Well of Stars and Shadow," it was written at the very tail end of October 2001 (thank you, Spooky) and appeared first on Gothic.net on the twelfth of that November. It was also included in Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold (which, for one reason and another, wasn't released until 2003). Only a few months later, in March 2002, I wrote my third Dancy short story, " Waycross," which was released as a chapbook by Subterranean Press, beautifully illustrated by Ted Naifeh (those four illustrations are reprinted herein). Like "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" before it, " Waycross " grew out of that paragraph from the end of Chapter Eight of Threshold, elucidating another of the episodes I'd begun to wonder about. In August, as I was finishing with Low Red Moon, I wrote in my online journal (9/17/02), "I know I still have one more Dancy story left to write, a prequel to ' Waycross,' but it may be months before I have time to write it." I suspected it would be titled "Bainbridge," and by this point Bill Schafer was asking about doing a collection of Dancy stories.

But then on March 18, 2003, roughly a year after I'd written " Waycross," I wrote an unanticipated piece called "Alabaster." Again, I refer to an entry from my online journal (these things can be very convenient): "…I did something I've never done before. I conceived of and finished a short story on the same day. I'd never even begun and finished a short story on the same day before. It's a very short piece, only about 1,000 wds., for the Camelot chapette book, titled 'Alabaster.' A brief glimpse at Dancy Flammarion on her way to ' Waycross,' set before that story, Threshold, and In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers." In 2004, as I began to plan for the Dancy collection, I expanded "Alabaster" into a full-length short story, which appears in print for the first time in this collection.