Can I call myself a writer yet?

Clearly it's been a while and yet the stats show that people have been viewing this page. I'm guessing it's because I've been a lot more active on Twitter recently as @J_D_Hathaway and there's a link in my bio. Partly that's been because of time off work due to illness and surgery and after my mum died and now for a nice long break at Christmas.

During this time I noticed that a few of the people I followed kept posting a hashtag #vss365. It took me a while to figure out what it was: a daily prompt word to get people to write a story within a single tweet. I followed for while longer and then started searching for the hashtag to see what other people had written and began to wonder if I could do it. I Googled(tm) vss365 and found this website https://vss365today.com/about that explained it and that there really were no rules. That definitely sounded like something I could have a go at.

I started on November 30th and since then haven't missed a day (I might in future). I've been looking forward to the daily prompt and although I struggled with some of them more than others it has been a joy trying to think of new things to say about "icicle" or "suave" that other people haven't already said. Some of them have been quite poor and some have had lots of people liking them - to me lots is 15 or 20. This new endeavour has also seen my twitter following grow from about 150, which took 10 years, to over 500 in the last month, which is almost unbelievable.

I've learned new words, had great interactions with #WritingCommunity, who are just some the the friendliest and most helpful people on Twitter, bought new books, had new books bought for me, enjoyed myself researching the meaning and etymology of words or the current maximum velocity of a spacecraft (67 kps after a gravity assist from the sun). Long may it continue.

P.S. If you want to have a look at just my #vss365 stuff this link https://twitter.com/search?q=(%23vss365)%20(from%3AJ_D_Hathaway)%20-filter%3Alinks%20-filter%3Areplies   will do a search on Twitter I would love feedback on any of them, especially what I can do to improve. Who knows, one day I might have the guts to try writing some flash fiction or a short story.