Title: My Day As Regan Forrester
Author: Misty Urban
Genre: Comedic Women’s Fiction
Book Blurb:
A Midwestern mom wakes up one morning as a hot young Hollywood starlet – and discovers she got the dangerous end of a body-swapping bargain.
Beth Barony is content with her middle-class, Middle America life. Really, she is. But she makes a tiny, secret birthday wish for more excitement in her life . . . and wakes up the next morning as Regan Forrester, a troubled young actor known for her rebellious smolder and empty head.
What could be more fun than playing a Hollywood princess for a day?
But Regan’s life isn’t at all glamorous. Her boyfriend is controlling and her apartment is a dump. While Beth scrambles to preserve Regan’s shaky career and tenuous relationships, Regan gleefully steals Beth’s husband, students, kids, and friends. And as the spell that switched them starts to unravel, Beth realizes why Regan wanted to escape her life: someone is trying to kill her.
If Beth doesn’t find a way to save both their lives, neither woman will have a life to go back to.
Excerpt:
Beth stared at the canopy above her bed. Since when did she have a purple princess canopy above her bed?
It was a pretty, gauzy lavender color, like looking at the underside of clouds. Her body felt wonderful. She felt strong and healthy with not a sore spot anywhere, like she was twenty years old again.
She sat up, but she had to be dreaming.
That wasn’t the nightstand from the bedroom set she’d made her husband Barony buy for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. The lamp had a pink scarf draped around it with dangling strings of beads. There was a bottle of lotion, but it wasn’t the lotion she put on her feet right before bed.
Her annotated copy of Wuthering Heights was missing, and that wasn't her cell phone. She’d had the same old beat-up phone for going on three years. This contraption on her nightstand, quietly vibrating as it registered an incoming text, was thin, unscratched, sophisticated, and bright plum purple.
Beth pushed back the covers of the bed. She was still in her negligee—her birthday present to her husband—but it was a lot tinier than she remembered, with more see-through lace. Beth glanced down at herself and did a double take. Wow, the light was especially forgiving this morning. Her legs looked lean and long and tanned, not a trace of cellulite. She couldn't even see the scar from the bicycling accident five years ago.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd woke up feeling this good. Barony was definitely in trouble, she thought as she turned to wake him up.
She screamed.
“What? What? What?” The man in her bed who was most definitely not Barony startled awake, arms flailing. “Someone breaking in?”
Beth clapped her hands to her mouth. “How did you get here?” she cried.
He shook his head. “Jeeper. Give me a heart attack.” He ran a hand over his shaved head and stubbled chin. “I got in late. You were already in bed.”
He looked like an actor on a show Beth used to watch in high school. The weirdness of this kept her still for a moment. “What did you do with Barony?”
“With who?” His eyebrows snapped together in a frown.
“With Barony!” Beth shrilled. “My husband!”
“Your what?” He sat up and swung around in the bed, grabbing her wrist.
“Where is my house?” Beth looked around the room. “Where is my bedroom? Where is my life?”
He grabbed her by both arms and looked her over. “Damn it, Regan! What did you take?”
“I didn't take anything! I went to sleep in my own bed and I woke up here! Who’s Regan?”
He shook her, and her head bobbed back and forth, which cut off the scream rising in her throat. “Benny gave you something again, didn’t he! And you took it. When you know it makes you all paranoid and freaky.”
“What on earth did he give me?” Beth gasped.
“How would I know!” He held both her wrists in one hand and looked around the room, muttering. “I'm going to kill Benny this time—”
“Don’t kill him before he can make it stop!” Beth took a deep breath. Don’t panic, Beth. She was a rational person. There had to be a rational explanation for this.
“Relax, babe. You're just going to have to chill until it’s over.”
“Let’s make it over now!” Beth said. “I have to get home to my husband, and my job, and I’m supposed to teach Wuthering Heights to the summer honors class next week.” She shook her wrists. “Let go of me!”
He drew back a hand, and Beth's jaw dropped. When she said nothing, his hand dropped as well.
She yanked her arms out of his grasp. “Were you about to hit me?”
“Listen to yourself! You sound crazy.”
“Well, I feel crazy,” Beth shouted. “This is not my room, I have no idea how I got here, and—” She glanced down at the cleavage exposed by the negligee. “This is not my body. What happened last night?”
“Look at me.” He leaned forward, so close that she had no choice. “Now listen. You freak out every time Benny gives you something. I don’t know why you keep pulling this, Regan! Seriously, I ought to—”
“Who is Regan?” Beth choked.
“You.” He spoke over her, taking her wrists once more. “Are Regan Forrester. We live in West Hollywood. You're twenty-four years old and a movie star who is—” his eyes ran over her— “smokin’ hot, and crazy as a chigger.
“I—” he shook her wrists again—“am your boyfriend. This is our apartment. Well, your apartment. Benny gave you something, and that's why you're having this weird freak out. You need to go back to bed and sleep it off. And stop looking at me like that. You’re giving me the creeps.”
“You have the creeps?” Beth repeated. “You are? I’m having a psychotic break. I need to call Sherice. Or Joan. And find Barony.” Her volume escalated.
He shook his head and tossed her wrists away. “You better take an aspirin and lie down. I'll—” He looked at her, frowning.
“Don’t you dare hit me!” Beth snapped. “No one has ever hit me in my life.”
He laughed. “Wouldn't your mama love to hear that? Give me your phone,” he demanded as the device trilled a musical tone. “That’s probably Benny texting to see if he killed you.”
Beth held the phone to her chest out of some wild, reflexive sense of self-preservation. “I’m calm. I need to think. Go away, please.”
He gave her a suspicious look, his eyes lingering on the negligee. “I’m gonna shower. And when I come out, you’re going to be over this little freak out. Okay?”
“Yes. Okay. You do that.” Beth watched as he walked into the bathroom, and then she stared at the back of the door and her reflection in the full-length mirror.
He wasn’t kidding. By whatever trick of the light or consequence of the mind-melding drugs she had supposedly taken, she looked exactly like Regan Forrester.
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What’s your favorite thing about the fall season:
I love the sound of fallen leaves scrunching beneath my feet, the excuse to add honey and lemon to my hot tea, lighting candles when evening falls, and the fall color that greets me when I step out my door. Fall is a complete feast for the senses!
What inspired you to write this story:
I was fascinated by that age-old urge to wonder what someone else’s like is life, but I wanted to write the twist: the ordinary woman wakes up in a celebrity’s body and finds out her life isn’t a fairy tale at all. It became a story of self-discovery but also one of friendship as Regan and Beth come to be honest with one another in ways they aren’t with anyone else in their lives.
One lucky reader will win a $75 Amazon (US) gift card.
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Runs September 1 – 30
Drawing will be held on October 1.
Author Biography:
Misty Urban is the author of three short story collections and assorted medieval scholarship on the topic of monstrous and misbehaving women. In her historical fiction and romances, she likes to reward her ambitious, rule-breaking heroines with handsome heroes and happy futures. She lives in Iowa with a handsome park ranger, two other budding authors, and a rather heavy collection of books.
Social Media Links:
Website: http://www.mistyurban.net
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