Michael Bedford
Michael Bedford (that's me you know) is a 'young' (hmmm, yes I believe I shall stick with young) professional who woke up one morning and thought 'I'd give that book writing thing a go, how hard can it be?' The answer to that question is - very hard, but very rewarding.
Movies, books and videogames are a big part of my life. I love anything that lets you escape into a fantasy world and see or live a life that is different to your own. I’ve always believed that escapism is an important part of keeping a healthy mind active. Many a night I’ve stayed up thinking about what I’ve seen, read or played and imagining the worlds in detail even the bits that have never been shown.
Back in the late 1990s I started to turn my passion for films into a passion for writing, my chosen field was to write screenplays. I was a young stage in life and had caught the acting bug and saw the big screen as the ultimate step. Through my school, college and early professional life I wrote constantly, making up my own worlds over and over again.
By the time I reached my 30s I was able to look back and realise that whilst life had taken me in different and happy directions I had a huge back catalogue of fantasy worlds that were sitting there waiting for something to happen. I had screenplays for horrors, dramas, thrillers and even musicals that were screaming for me to do something with.
That’s when I realised I needed to do something. I got up off the sofa and decided that I was going out for a walk. One look out of the window made me realise that it was a little breezy and I’d left my coat at work so I decided to stay at home and turn my hand to writing a book, something I’ve always been interested in doing.
During my early writing years, I’d written a copy of short comedy stories and even published them online to a website I created (not sure if anyone but me ever actually saw this website). I’d been bitten by the book writing bug, it just took me a long time to act on it.
It was in 2012 that I felt I had reached a point in my life that I was ready to tackle my first actual book, the only question was what was I going to write. To that point I visited my folks and went and found my old book of had written scripts that they were ‘storing’ for me out in the garage (behind the lawnmower). Searching through them, an old screenplay about monsters on a boat caught my eye and I realised that my first book was going to have to be a horror about zombie-like creatures on a boat.
The writing progress was chaotic and took many months, but eventually I’d knocked a novel into a rough shape. With a passion and a zest (of an extremely slow snail) I would spend the next six years shaping that rough text into my first novel ‘StranDEAD’ which is available on amazon now.
