Charlie "Antipope" Stross and I just finished collaborating on "Jury Service," a 20,000-word novella. I've collaborated on other projects before, but never with someone whom I'd never met, nor anything quite this long and ad-hoc (Karl and I wrote the 100,000-word manuscript for The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction together, but that was a much more rigid project with a solid outline), nor while my life was in such upheaval. For all that, the collaboration went very smoothly, and the results are marvellous, if I do say so myself. Charlie celebrated the completion of the first draft with a post to rec.arts.sf.composition detailing some of the pitfalls we avoided (and some we fell into) in our collaboration.
Momentum. If you write a thousand words, then pass it to your collaborator to write another thousand words, the process can lose momentum abruptly. In my case, I collaborated with someone who is based mostly in the Bay Area (who I've never met face to face). Because I'm eight hours ahead of him, I'd typically finish some work in the evening and email it to him. He'd receive it in the morning (his time zone) and if he was too busy to work on it the same day, he'd send it back to me the next day. But his next day meant an extra 8 hours delay due to time zones — so instead of a 24-hour turnaround we averaged more like 48-72 hours.
