If I Had You (Bedford, Deborah)

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Would you like us to take another look at this review? No, cancel Yes, report it Thanks! You've successfully reported this review. We appreciate your feedback. July 31, Imprint: You can read this item using any of the following Kobo apps and devices: But, like many romance novels, her work included sex scenes with unmarried characters, a fact that came to trouble her.

A turning point in Bedford's career came when a biblical allegory in a sermon by her minister convinced her that books with premarital sex scenes in them did not serve God and that she had compromised her religious beliefs for success as a romance novelist.

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She decided she wanted to write inspirational, Christian romances from then on. She left her publisher and her agent and sent out new manuscripts to Christian publishers, but at first her search did not go well; she went three years without publishing a new book. She says she looked at the difficulties as God testing her convictions, so she lived off her credit cards for a while.

Eventually, her perseverance paid off. One of her new stories, "The Hair Ribbons, " was published in in Multnomah Press' The Story Jar , a collection of three novellas about motherhood accompanied by letters and anecdotes from other authors.

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Bedford read from the story at the Jackson Hole Writer's Conference a gathering she co-founded and described her decision to move from mass-market fiction to Christian fiction. In the audience was Jamie Raab, publisher of Warner Books, who invited Bedford to become an author for the company's new imprint of Christian books, Warner Faith. The new novels Bedford wrote confronted difficult topics. In 's A Rose by the Door , for instance, the main character is a woman who prays for her son to come home, only to find out he has died.

The protagonist of her next book, 's A Morning Like This , discovers that her husband has had an affair and secretly fathered a child. When You Believe , published in , tells the story of a high school counselor who is in love with a teacher, and then hears from a student that the teacher abused her. In the market today, anything goes as long as it's handled right.

Nora is hard on Tess, but eventually confronts her own long-denied secret, which had hurt her for years. Bedford's determination to write redemptive stories seems inspired by her own past and her spiritual journey. I grew up believing that everyone had to stay 'good' all the time and if you slipped a little then, well, you might as well fall all the way. Her decision to switch to Christian fiction came soon after.

Bedford's next book, Remember Me , told the story of Sam Tibbits, a middle-aged minister who, facing burnout after a death in his family, takes a sabbatical and returns to the place in the Pacific Northwest where he spent his summers as a child, and he runs into the woman he was in love with as a teenager, who disappeared before he could propose marriage to her. Publishers Weekly called the novel "a multilayered, rewarding read" and praised Tibbits' character as "beautifully drawn. In , Bedford was busily acquiring the rights to her older books and rewriting them, or redeeming them, as she put it, replacing the premarital sex scenes with different plot points.

First to be republished, in , was her Harlequin romance Just Between Us , followed by her historical novel Blessing the next year, both published this time by Harlequin's new Christian publishing house, Steeple Hill Books. But for Bedford, replacing sex with God did not mean getting rid of romance. The reason "we're fascinated with secular romance, " Bedford asserted in the Focus on Fiction interview, is that "God physiologically designed us to be drawn to a romance with Him. Selected writings Touch the Sky , Harlequin Superromance, A Distant Promise , Harlequin Superromance, To Weave Tomorrow , Harlequin Superromance, After the Promise , Harlequin Superromance,