Oh, I know it's usually nothing bad (my mother's an English teacher, and a bunch of my classmates in grad school were TAs, so I've seen the paper-grading process from the other end) -- it's the paralyzing fear that it *might* be bad and I might get a bad grade that got me. I was the same way about checking my grades for classes at the end of each term.
I'm not sure how it works with most people who co-write stuff -- seanchai and I live in the same apartment, and before that we went to the same college, so we've always been in the same physical location for most of the stuff we've written together -- the outline is less to keep us on the same page as far as the story goes, and more because we both like having that structure even when we write by ourselves (I don't know what we'd do if one of us was the outline-writing type and the other was one of those writers who finds outlines stifling). If we had to collaborate via IM or email the way I know a lot of other people who co-write do, I suspect we'd work differently (ex: I know some people will divide up who writes what scene, round-robin-style, or who writes which character, rpg-style).
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I'm not sure how it works with most people who co-write stuff -- seanchai and I live in the same apartment, and before that we went to the same college, so we've always been in the same physical location for most of the stuff we've written together -- the outline is less to keep us on the same page as far as the story goes, and more because we both like having that structure even when we write by ourselves (I don't know what we'd do if one of us was the outline-writing type and the other was one of those writers who finds outlines stifling). If we had to collaborate via IM or email the way I know a lot of other people who co-write do, I suspect we'd work differently (ex: I know some people will divide up who writes what scene, round-robin-style, or who writes which character, rpg-style).