Lauren Carrico asked Erin Michelle Sky:

What inspired you to write "The Intuitives"? How long did it take to write?

Erin Michelle Sky Hi, Lauren! Thanks for your question! Steven and I were approached several years ago by a fledgling gaming company that was interested in having us write some of their quest lines. In researching the market, we became immersed in a few different gaming cultures, and we were struck by the tremendous teamwork and diversity of MMORPG guilds and clans. They are the only teams we know in which a lawyer will take direction from a ten-year-old child--because the team objective is the most important thing to everyone and because in that raid or on that map, the child happens to be the fastest or the most experienced player. We saw teams made up of teachers and students, programmers and farmers, artists and mathematicians, all working together for a common goal, and we felt inspired to write a book about that kind of teamwork!

As for how long it took to write...

In his short story, "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories," Neil Gaiman wrote:

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.
Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself.

That's kind of how The Intuitives was. The first draft took less than three months to write. Then we left it alone for a while while we worked on other things. We went back and edited it several months later, removing about 15,000 words from the novel, but that process only took a few weeks. We credit the characters themselves for the speed with which the book flowed. It was as though they were right there telling us what they were thinking, what they said, and how it all happened!

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