I don't collaborate with people on that stuff. Partially it's because of my awful personality and my distinct aroma, but part of it is is that for me it's just hard to really work with another person and not get distracted. However, at this moment I'm not a full-time freelancer, so who knows, when I do make the plunge, perhaps a goal buddy could be a good idea...unless we just end up meeeting once a week at the coffeeshop eating biscotti and bitching about our significant others.

I wanted to know if goal buddying does work for freelancers, and how they avoid distractions, and posted the question on Ask Metafilter:

I have worked with a writer's group that met every two weeks. It worked in the sense of providing deadlines, which is the best motivator, and in providing feedback for moving forward with a new draft. It's a great tool and I dont know if there's any secret besides taking care of business first before going on to personal stuff. Having a deadline and people to hold me to it ("i'll bring you a new draft by the 23rd so you can read it and we can discuss on the 30th") is the key for me.

If you have a writing buddy like this, it could be fun to have a weekly competition of "who has a larger wordcount" for each week; loser buys the winner a beer! You could also give each other 'assignments' if you were stuck, like, "Ok, by next week I want to see you kill off a character" or "I dare you to work the phrase "six pints of eggplant soup" into your text."

Not meeting in person helps cut down on the small talk. We kept each other updated on our projects and met socially at other times, but the phone calls were specifically geared toward getting us to actually do some writing.