Deborah Bedford was born in Texas and earned her degree in journalism and marketing from Texas A&M University. For her birthday in the summer of 1984, her husband, Jack, bought her a copy of the 1984 Writers' Market, and she began to meticulously send letters to every publisher listed in the book. Rejection letters flowed back by the handfuls. She has a large folder where, for posterity's sake, she has kept these to this day.
BR>When Deborah's first book, Touch the Sky, was released by the Harlequin Superromance line, its sales topped every Harlequin record for a first-time author. It earned rave reviews and a Romantic TimesReviewer's Choice award.
During the next seven years, Deborah published six more books for the Harlequin Superromance series 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 steamy 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."
"I am writing with the joy of a new love," Deborah says. "My journey to writing for the Lord 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."
