Biography
Deborah Bedford was born in Texas and earned her degree in journalism and a minor
in marketing from Texas A&M University. Immediately after graduation, she accepted
editorship of Evergreen Today, a weekly newspaper based in the small mountain town
of Evergreen, Colorado. While serving as editor there, Deborah worked 70 or 80 hours
each week, writing stories and cut-lines, sports and features, chasing fire trucks
and checking police reports, taking pictures, editing, laying out pages, opaquing
the negatives, stacking papers into vending machines, and taking out the quarters.
When
she married her husband, Jack, in 1982, Deborah took a position as account executive
and copywriter for a Colorado advertising agency. It was during this stint at the
ad agency that she began to dream of returning to her first love, fiction writing.
This dream became reality in 1984 when she rented an IBM Selectric typewriter and
set to work late at night and early in the mornings, whenever she could find the
time to write.
For her birthday in the summer of 1984, Jack bought her a copy of the
1984 Writers' Market, and she began to meticulously send letters to every publisher
listed in the book. To this day, she and her husband laugh about it and call that
time the 'media blitz.' Rejection letters flowed back by the handfuls. She has a
large folder where, for posterity's sake, she has kept these to this day. She has
also kept the letter from Harlequin Books she received, which invited her to submit
a complete manuscript but warned her that Harlequin did not want books about cowboys,
airline pilots, guest ranches or Texans.
Deborah laughs now when she tells the story.
Her manuscript was the story of “a woman who marries an airline pilot in Texas. Then,
when he dies in a plane crash, she runs away to a guest ranch and falls in love with
a cowboy.” When she showed her husband, Jack, the letter, he said, “Honey, you've
managed to write a manuscript that has everything in it they don't want.” Harlequin
bought the manuscript five short weeks after Deborah submitted it.
When Deborah's
first book, Touch The Sky, was released by Harlequin Superromance, its sales topped
every Harlequin record for a first-time author. It earned rave reviews and a Romantic
Times Reviewer's Choice award. At that time, Deborah's editor told her, 'This book
isn't a romance, but we're going to publish it anyway.'
During the next seven years,
Deborah published six more books with Harlequin Superromances and a historical novel,
Blessing, before signing a contract with HarperCollins Publishers. This paved the
way for her to move on to write mass-market mainstream women's fiction, where her
work garnered numerous awards and appeared on the USA Today bestseller list.
The word
Deborah uses to describe her career is 'beguiling.' Whenever she wrote words about
Jesus or God in her stories, those spiritual overtones were never touched, edited
or omitted. But, along with those words, Deborah admits that she was writing sex
scenes. "I wanted all the reward that the world would give me," she says. "I wanted
all the fame, and all the status. But I realized that I was giving away lentils in
the Lord's battlefield. That's when I became convicted. The time had come for a change."
What
surprises Bedford the most, she says, is the freedom she now finds in writing for
her Heavenly Father. "It feels like gloriously falling forward and wondrously coming
home, all at the same time," she says.
The Story Jar, published in March 2001 by Multnomah
Publishers (now Random House), written along with Angela Elwell Hunt and Robin Lee
Hatcher, and including pieces from Left Behind author Jerry Jenkins, and Francine
Rivers, Debbie Macomber and Lori Copeland, marks Deborah's writing debut for the
inspirational market. It held a spot on the CBA Bestseller List for three consecutive
months.
While still shopping for the right publisher for her novel-length fiction,
Deborah had the opportunity to stand up at the Jackson Hole Writers' Conference,
read an excerpt from The Story Jar, and explain to conference attendees about the
call she felt to leave mass-market fiction and follow the Lord. In the audience that
evening was Jamie Raab, publisher of Warner Books. The rest, as everyone says, felt
like stars moving into place.
A Rose By The Door, Deborah's first with Warner Book
(name changed to FaithWords in 2006), hit bookstores in November 2001. A Morning
Like This was released by Warner Books in 2002. Deborah's short story, “Connor Sapp's
Baseball Summer,” is included in Multnomah Publisher's The Storytellers' Collection,
Tales From Home, alongside stories by Chuck Colson, Terri Blackstock, Randy Alcorn
and Karen Kingsbury.
Deborah and Jack have two children, Jeff and Avery. When she
isn't writing, Deborah spends her time fly-fishing, cheering at American Legion baseball
games, shopping with her daughter, singing praise songs while she walks along the
banks of Flat Creek, and taking her dachshund Annie for hikes in the Tetons where
they live.
“I am writing with the joy of a new love,” Deborah says. “My journey to
Warner Books has been not so much a decision but a beautiful process of being picked
up and carried over. This is only the beginning. Where I thought constraints would
box me in as a writer, where I thought I might have to make my stories smaller to
fit into a Christian mold, the opposite has proven true. I am seeing, in my writing,
that these stories must be written big, in the same transparent way that our lives
must be lived as Christians. To gloss over problems we have, to make things seem
easier than they are, is to gloss over the power of what our loving Heavenly Father
can do.”
