Dormant Slugs & Critiquing Burnout

Ah, today was so much better than yesterday. No gremlins, and I had a much easier time than usual getting out of bed.

Reading: More of Musicophilia. Gotta love a book that combines my music geekery with my fairly newfound fascination with neuroscience.

Exercise: 30 minute yoga session. I'm always amazed by the way yoga manages to kick my ass on a physical level while relaxing me on a mental level.

Music Stuff: Did some practicing.

Writing: Only a little bit of work done on the chapter 2 rewrite, but I had less time than usual at my disposal today since I had a hairdresser appointment and a re-sized bracelet to go pick up. I'm actually amazed I got any writing done at all. In the past, I've been terrible about going, "Well, there's no sense getting into this story if I'm just going to have to leave in an hour or two, so I'll play a game or surf the internet instead."

Other Stuff: Critiqued a story for this weekend's writing group meeting. Speaking of critiquing . . .

The only downside to my day is that I still seem to be suffering from critique burnout. Ever since I finally got through the gazillion stories we had to crit for TNEO last summer, I've come to dread critiquing. It's gotten better, but every time I sit down to critique something, I still have this feeling of dread--not of the "this is gonna suck" variety, but rather of the "I want to do anything but critique" variety. So unless I have a deadline to get it done by, simply starting a critique is a major challenge for me.

If the story ends up being really interesting and/or just has really strong writing, the dread usually goes away and I can critique in a healthy state of mind, even if I have a fair amount of criticism to offer. But as soon as I start finding lotsof issues and/or there's nothing in the story that really hooks me, the dread gets worse--especially if there are problems on the basic grammar level. I'll feel like I've been reading forever only to glance down and see that I'm only on page 2 out of 24. And that's not good, because that dread doesn't help me or the poor soul who's going to get my dread-shrouded critique.

So on that note, anyone know of any cures for critique-a-phobia?