I’ve talked about the #MyWANA Twitter community before over at my Hero’s Tale blog. But let me give you a quick refresher: WANA stands for We Are Not Alone. Writing is an extremely solitary practice. So, to have somewhere to gather on-line like this is important. And a lot of fun. See founder Kristen Lamb’s blog entry, or my link above if you want more info.

As I’ve participated in the community, something became quickly apparent. The vast majority is female.

Now, I don’t know if this is an indication that there are more female writers, or just more females involved. It did make me wonder something about this group. So on August 23, I asked this question 3 times during the day: How many of you were at home during the day (with kids or not) and how many worked and did writing afterwords.

Now this was an idle curiosity, not a scientific survey. Please don’t take my results as anything more than some interesting results.

I got 15 replies, and had to rework my initial categories a bit:

• 3 work full-time.
• 4 work from home
• 6 are at home
• 2 work part time

Of the 15, 8 said they have kids:

• 6 who have kids are at home
• 2 work part time

All the gals who are at home are at home with kids. Plus, all those who work part-time have kids. I shouldn’t say I’m surprised, but I didn’t think I’d see something that extreme. I thought there might be one or two that had no kids at home. That could be explained by the sample size, though.

To extrapolate a little, the vast majority of the women on #MyWANA are at home in some fashion (home full-time, work from home, or part-time). I suspected that might be the case, but didn’t quite expect so much variance.

Part of me wants to think that this group would have a lot of time to write, and so they are hanging out on #MyWANA, writing. But I’m probably wrong. This is where my favorite quote from this exercise comes in. Christine Ashworth’s reply addresses this perfectly:

I work. I was a stay-at-home, but I get more writing done now that I’m working again.

I thought about that, and I completely understand. I thought about my wife at home with our 3 kids. There are days that she gets more done after the kids are in bed than during the rest of the day. I know I do. During NaNoWriMo, I get most of my writing done during the week in the evenings. Weekends are all but useless to me for writing.

Truthfully, other than some fun stats, I really don’t know what you should take from all this. So I’ll leave you with this. The #MyWANA tribe is a great place to hang out. Everyone is friendly and willing to help. Whether you are a stay-at-home mom/dad or work for any amount of time. Everyone is welcome. See you there!