Oh, how the years fly by! by Annette Bridges

Where did your love of writing come from?

It’s hard to remember where my love of writing came from. It seems like I’ve always loved to keep diaries and journals. One of my earliest writing memories is after my mom divorced my dad when I was ten years old and we began our journey from Georgia to Texas. There are those who would have called us homeless and poor. But that was never the view we had of ourselves. I thought we were on an adventure to a find a new world. And my mom had a way of making me believe we had all we needed. I remember my mom encouraging me to write down everything I was grateful for every day.

How long have you been writing?

I started writing publicly the Christmas after 9/11.  My daughter (my only child) left for college two weeks before September 11, 2001. That Christmas was a time when it seemed like everyone was fearful about what would happen next and joy wasn’t as easy to come by as it once was. I wanted to share about the Christmas during our westward journey after my mom’s divorce. We had a Charlie Brown Christmas tree and made our decorations. We had very little but against all odds that Christmas is one of my happiest Christmas memories. I wanted others to know it was possible to feel happy in spite of living in uncertainty and fearful times. I sent my story in to the Dallas Morning News and they published it. That was the beginning of a decade of published newspaper and magazine columns.

What kinds of writing do you do?

My column writing years became the basis for three books. And I have more books I could write and want to write. These books are non-fiction, short story memoirs. They are light-hearted and inspirational. Hope-filled. Encouraging. Between the three books, the lives and experiences of three generations of southern women are shared: mine, my mamma’s and my daughter’s.

My children’s coloring storybook teaches children about friendship, how to be a good friend and was inspired by a young childhood friendship of mine. The primary lesson teaches children how you can be very different from each other and still be friends, even best friends. This also describes the friendship between my dachshund and my daughter’s dachshund – Lady and Bella. So the dachshunds became the book’s characters. It’s a fictional story in a dachshund’s world! There’s another Lady and Bella friendship story in my children’s cookbook, Lady and Bella’s Alphabet Kitchen.

What is something you want to accomplish before you die?

I can imagine many more books but there is one I really hope I get to write. It will require me traveling and retracing the route my grandmother traveled from Georgia to California when she journeyed alone as a single 20 year old woman in 1911. She was meeting the man she would marry who was already in California waiting for her arrival. They had met in Georgia and he went ahead to get a job and place for them to live after they married. She was such a brave, sassy, bold and adventurous woman. It will be a fictional story because I don’t know all of her story. So writing a fiction novel will be a first for me. There’s a lot I do know (and not telling now) so you’ll have to wait to read my book to find out all of her dirty little secrets as well as the scandalous ones that made the newspapers!

If you had a superpower, what would it be?

The ability to make everyone live forever!