With a new year in the offing, I’m taking a look at the last one.

On a personal level, I had a busy year — Leaving Mundania came out; I traveled to conventions all over the US (and Scandinavia) on tour, I helped organize the Nordic larp Mad About the Boy in the US, tried my hand at writing freeform, and landed a second book deal.

On the blog, things cooked too — 53 blog posts! That means 53 days of scouring the internet for your comments, feverishly checking analytics, and obsessing over how many “likes” I logged on social media. Here is how the year fell out:

Top 5 Blog Posts By Viewership*

If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight

I snarked on Twilight, imagining what it’d be like if famous authors had penned the teen vampire novel. Technically, I wrote the post in 2011, but after io9.com reposted it in early 2012, it went viral, even landing a mention in the New York Times. 440,000 people read the thing on io9 and posted more than 300 comments. Even on my little site, the post exploded, logging about 40,000 pageviews and 251 comments.

Given the high traffic on this post, it’s no surprise that the much older How to Read Twilight, linked in the famous writers text, logged the second-highest page views of the year with around 9,000 pageviews.

Mad About the Boy Sign-Up

Coming in a distant second with nearly 3,000 page views is sign-up for the US-run of the Nordic larp Mad About the Boy.

Nordic Larp for Noobs

Clocking in at number 3 with 1,800 page views is this post, which tries to explain the deceptive term “Nordic larp” to a new audience.

American Jerkform: A Manifesto

With only six weeks of publication under its belt, the American Jerkform Manifesto (“There’s no negotiating with bees.”) scores a #4 slot with nearly 1,200 page views.

Mad About the Debrief

My initial take on how Mad About the Boy came out closes out the top five with 987 page views.

(* Though they logged mega-page views — more than 1,000 each! — I didn’t count How to Create a Fun Larp Character or How to Assemble a Larp Costume since they came out in 2011.)

Top Five Countries of Readership

After my native US readership, which dwarfs the competition, I’ve got readers in…

1. United Kingdom
2. Canada
3. Australia
4. Denmark
5. Sweden

Happy New Year!