Senior year is so full of college stress and everyday crises that sometimes it’s difficult to remember to follow your personal goals.

But a friend and I braved the chaos and managed to complete a long-held goal.

Venture School senior Ariel Autumns and I have spent the last six months writing a novel together.

About three months ago, the first draft was completed, marking the first time that either of us completed such an endeavor.

The novel, titled “Reverie,” details the exploits of a friend group as they venture into a video game world that players can live inside.

They are forced to deal with foes ranging from an amoral hacker to a sadistic virus.

The idea for the novel came from our love of video games. Autumns and I enjoyed the idea of being able to live two lives, one normal and the other fantastical, which the characters experience in the book.

We wanted to make friendship a very important aspect of the book, even more so than the romantic relationships.

Of course, my friendship with Autumns grew closer due to this. I didn’t truly know her until I lived inside her words.

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have our fair share of disagreements.

“There are parts where we clashed, and we let that clash overwhelm the writing once in a while,” said Autumns.

But when it came down to it, we pushed through our arguments and completed our work, fulfilling a long-time dream of ours together.

Autumns and I first met at a sleepover. The night we met, we stayed up all night talking about our lives, and by morning, we had become close friends.

She, too, loves writing, and has wanted to write a novel.

We also found that two of us share a strong interest in fantasy and science fiction novels. This genre is what inspired much of “Reverie,” which includes the use of the “sword-and-sorcery” trope and high-tech gaming systems.

At another slumber party, Autumns and I decided that we’d co-write a novel. We began planning it out from that moment on.

After a few weeks of developing characters and a general idea of the plot, we started writing. We both preferred not to plan out the entire novel beforehand. Instead, we decided to see where the characters took us.

Much of the novel was written between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. over Google Docs, communicating through the chat system.

The novel is split into four acts, each with several chapters. Each act has a separate conflict, but the conflicts all connect and lead into one another.

The chapters also switch points of view.

Autumns wrote for the female protagonist, Alexis “Lex” Edenson and Naomi “Azura” Lololi, Lex’s best friend.

She also wrote Hats, a gender fluid character who plays a central role in the last half of the book.

I wrote for the male protagonist, Kai “Malakai” Lowell and Will, Malakai’s in-game friend and love interest.

We also shared Seven, an ADHD character that starts out as mere comic relief but ends up integral to certain arcs.

Once we started, we formed the idea of a Virus character, an unnatural creature in the game that enjoys torturing players.

He’s able to manipulate the coding of the game, and is practically un-killable.

A few of our friends acted as “beta readers,” or a group of test readers designed to evaluate the potential of the book.

Now that the beta readers are almost done, Autumns and I are in the midst of a rewrite.

We will then self-publish through Amazon’s CreateSpace and begin book two.

“There are a lot of characters that didn’t get the sort of evolution that they needed, so we’re going to give them that in the sequel,” said Autumns.