Seriously, what is it about The MAD Doctrine?

I just remembered that I posted The MAD Doctrine to ff.net at some point, and decided to check if there'd been any comments. (I know, I know, it's ff.net, and you take it seriously at your peril - and I *don't* take it very seriously, as demonstrated by the fact I forget about it for months at a time.) So... still zero comments. Basically everything else on the first page (yep, it's still on the first page - there isn't much new LoM fic anymore) of the ff.net LoM section has comments. (Well, there are three other fics that don't. All of those are much more recent, though.)

But, seriously: *usually* (judging by other fics I've posted there in the past, that is) I got *some* kind of feedback there eventually. So what is it about The MAD Doctrine that makes it so unattractive? It just puzzles me.

(It's also not been getting any new comments anywhere else, not after the first two weeks or so, but I guess that's normal in a small, aging fandom.)

Hmm. I guess the ff.net thing bothers me because I kind of thought this would be a fic that would certainly not find a huge audience (I generally don't write the kind of stuff that finds huge audiences ;-)) but I *was* fairly confident that it would find the occasional reader who'd *really* love it - and those are usually the people who leave some feedback. I didn't really expect more than one or two such readers (on ff.net). But a complete lack of feedback in four or five months basically means it didn't really find *any* reader like that there at all. And that surprises me (and saddens me a bit, too).

I have enough hubris to still believe it's among the very best things I've written. But it does make me wonder if, I dunno, perhaps most of the reading audience of ff.net's LoM section consists of people who remember me as an insufferable arrogant asshole from TRA? Or something. It brings out my paranoid side - I'm wondering, "Is it *me* they dislike?"

And yeah, I know it's vastly more likely that they dislike - or rather, just don't care about - the fic rather than myself. It's been five years, and fandom doesn't have that long a memory, so the people who are reading stuff on ff.net now probably don't know that I have A History.

I guess ultimately I kind of prefer to believe that it's me, and not the fic, though. I don't want to believe that I wrote something that doesn't move anyone. (And initial feedback did seem to indicate that it *did* work for people! But maybe the LJ audience is just very different.)

God, it's been what, six months? I need to stop angsting periodically about this.

It's the ridiculous amounts of time that elapse between my fics that mostly causes this particular brand of angst, I bet. Normal people would have published half a dozen fics since February, so feedback for a fic from February would be a very distant concern...

BTW

If you ever see a fic of mine - but especially The MAD Doctrine - recced anywhere, I'd be grateful for a link. Not that I think it will get recced (I'm not active enough in the fandom to remain in people's memories long enough these days, I think). But just in case it does, it'd make me happy to know.

Feedback for The MAD Doctrine was/is weird in general, though:

for instance, the *only* comment the story got on AO3 is from a reader who doesn't know the fandom at all, and got there via a rec from *another* "external", i.e. non-LoM-fandom reader.

I mean, this is brilliant, of course! Getting feedback and recs from readers who aren't into the fandom you're writing about is among the biggest compliments there are, in my book, because it's that much harder to make someone care about your characters if they're not already invested in them. So, wow, that comment and that rec made me very, very happy.

But to have that be the *only* feedback you get in a given place is also... somewhat weird, isn't it? :D

(Yes, I do know it's because everyone else already commented on LJ.)

Kind of annoyed...

at how my escalating Radiohead obsession stole away my energy for the LoM archive trawl I'd begun in February, actually. LoM is still the fandom I'm "writing" fic about in my mind all the time, so it's definitely still an active fandom for me. But my fannish reading, in the last few months, has been Citizen Insane - a mindbogglingly huge collection of twenty-odd years' worth of Radiohead media coverage, which I consume as obsessively as I ever consumed fic.

The good thing is, once I'm done with that, that'll be that. New Radiohead media coverage isn't generated at the same rate as new fic (not even fic in a slow and old fandom), so once I've read the entire archive, there won't be any new, large amounts of text about Radiohead that demand to be read. So, with that in mind, I try to basically get it over with as quickly as I can, so as to be able to then go back to more fannishly productive things such as fic archive trawls.

I'm still only in the mid-nineties with my Radiohead article reading endeavour, though, so there's still about seventeen years to go. Arrgh.