Nine nights, nine things to look at
A read-aloud structure: one idea per night, short enough for bedtime and complete enough to stand on its own.
LIN
Lin, the sleeping dragon, a story in nine nights.
Lin is Empiria Global's publishing project: a read-aloud story told over nine nights, followed by an apprentice's notebook, that teaches children and adults how to read a landscape, where the breath of a place comes from, where the water goes, and where a house sits well.
All mountains are sleeping dragons. From that first image the book teaches a practical craft, one night at a time: following a ridge back to see where it descends from, finding the narrow necks where the breath still passes, reading the four sides of a good site, telling the inner curve of a river from the arc that cuts.
Each night ends with something to look at rather than something to believe. The old fox who teaches the two apprentices, Wen, thirteen, with a notebook, and Pim, four, with a stick, keeps saying the craft is not about knowing but about looking, and that the youngest, who noticed which side of the path the water ran on, was already ahead.
The book closes with an apprentice's notebook: a city translation table (the street is the river; the sharp corner opposite your window is the pointing finger), the original Chinese names behind each image, a note on the two classical schools, the three beginner mistakes, and the plain reason the rules hold: wind, water, sun, drainage, and a nervous system that settles with its back to a wall.
Who it is for
- Families reading aloud
- Schools and libraries
- Adults meeting the subject for the first time
- Publishers and translators
Status
Manuscript complete in Spanish: nine nights plus the apprentice's notebook. Illustration direction, editing and translation are open, and we are glad to talk with publishers.
Talk to us about LinWhat the book is built on
Looking before knowing
The craft is taught as observation, not doctrine. What can be looked up is not the lesson; what went unnoticed is.
Symbol with content inside
The dragon is the wrapper. Inside are empirical rules about wind, water, sun and drainage, kept in symbolic language because three thousand years ago there was no other.
Two readers at once
A four-year-old is given one rule to keep. An adult gets the notebook, the translations and the sources. Same book.