Virtual co-authors. Absence makes the mind work better?

Grauniad

In this respect, online collaborations can be supremely efficient. The qualities I identified in my co-author, Peter S Fosl, which made him a good collaborator, were all manifest in our email communications and in his work. He was knowledgeable, clear, flexible, enthusiastic about communicating ideas and responsive to suggestions and advice. What more did I need to know? Whether he liked his lattes skinny?

...This kind of online collaboration has the potential to become a more common and effective way of working. It is not just that it allows individuals to interact only on the basis of the qualities that matter for the job, it is also that the job itself can be focused on more precisely than face-to-face working sometimes allows.

For example, whenever I get together with my co-editor we always end up discussing rambling digressions and getting off the point. When we're co-operating online, however, the task in hand stays in focus.

That was one reason why writing The Philosophers' Toolkit was so straightforward. We both knew our roles and we executed them without distraction...

There was genuine interaction and collaboration. In a paradoxical-sounding way, the limitations of internet communication actually liberated us to work more efficiently together.

Focus? I'm focused, I'm focused! Hey! Look! A bee!

Okay, I'm not focused, I'm split. Alternating beteween seeking out the energy of others, enjoying the to-and-fro, then going off and doing something with it solitarily, or between my self-and another or duo of collaborators. I'm sure I'm no different from many. People have rhythmns; rhythmns ain't so without modulation. On-off, and transition in-between. Certainly would explain the huge expansion of "third-places" like coffee-shops and bookstores, many populated by corporate truants looking for a more relaxed zone, or by S.O.H.O. denizens looking for a people-fix as much as a caffeine one.

"Write in haste, edit at leisure," Mom used to say, in order to get us to attack a blank page. Write in haste, edit at leisure. Don't think, just do. Get it out, then make sense of it. I can see how that spewing, that seeming-senselessness can be awfully discomfiting when someone has to witness it happening outside their own head. (We're comfortable with our own dissonances, eh?) Then you clean yourself and your prose, your ideas up, straighten your hair, and go face the world and your collaborators. Who've probably just done the same thing. Guess this is the reason many don't blog or hate to write: Half the time we think we look presentable but the collar's still at odd angles, hair is standing sideways. Ideas still askew. Who cares? The rush is fun.