Just For Fun: Outtakes from The Rose Throne

At one point, my editor asked me to try writing a series of epitaphs for the beginning of each chapter. Here are a few of the better ones. None of them ended up in the book, by the way. It just didn't end up seeming right. But you try things in the writing process and they don't always work.

Rejected epigraphs Nov 2011:

A woman who loves too well is like a woman who forgets herself in her neweyr. She may return to herself, but she will never be the same again. And she will always be wary of giving too much a second time.

                                                                                                               --Marriage and Neweyr

My neweyr is my child. My kingdom is my body. My women are my eyes. My plants are my breasts. My animals are my feet.

                                                                                               --The True Book of Neweyr

A girl who is born on a winter’s night is bound to have a great neweyr, for the world has been storing it up for her.

--Neweyr in Law and Practice

A mother can show her daughter the way to the neweyr, but she cannot make her drink it in. She must wait and see what her daughter wills, and how she takes the neweyr into herself her own way.

                                                                               --A Mother’s Legacy

There are many loves. The love between a parent and a child. The love between a sister and a brother. Between friends and lovers. But there is one great love. That of neweyr for taweyr. For a true love must be love for that which is utterly different, and can never be encompassed or understood.

                                                                         --Advice From A Mother to Her Daughter

Women, look for a man who is stirred by the passion of his taweyr. He must fight against it, but if there is no fight, there is no power and no control. A man of taweyr will make many children.

                                               --Proper Marriage and the Weyrs