Closing down the Smarter Artist part of Sterling and Stone was bittersweet for us. We have a desire to teach, but the transactional nature of the Smarter Artist brand leeched life from the fiction side of the company. We’re passionate about uplifting the community through honest transparency, but a tell-all platform became the very thing that crippled us. If we wanted to continue telling stories, letting go of the Smarter Artist was inevitable. And the best way to fill the void was to turn our educational efforts inward. But we realized that as the stable of writers within the company grew, our need for an internal curriculum became more and more essential. We need to have materials available for our storytellers that allows them to learn everything we’d learned about the art of storytelling and the practice of collaboration. Then we met someone awesome: Neeve Silver. Neeve joined the family to help us market our books as we settle into the fiction-first stage of the company. And as an outsider looking in, she showed us how we were stepping back from our community when they needed us most. And that was the lightbulb moment. In today’s (and next week’s) podcast, we want to share what the next chapter of the non-fiction side of Sterling and Stone looks like. And we believe that it’ll both serve our internal needs and the needs of those who still want to learn from our hijinks. We Talk About: Black Summer (https://www.netflix.com/title/80198988) Sean recommends watching The Sinner (https://www.netflix.com/title/80175802) for a study on Mystery Box storytelling Neeve recommends All Our Wrong Todays (https://www.amazon.com/All-Our-Wrong-Todays-Novel-ebook/dp/B01FEY5EP2) Smarter Artist has evolved into the Stone Table. Building an internal curriculum. Neeve’s perspective after two months in the company. Why the Smarter Artist wasn’t sustainable. The forthcoming Stone Table books.