Christina Hobbs (left) and Lauren Billings
Brystan Studios

It takes two

Duo’s modern romance set in the West features cowboys, clues and reconnection

by MICHELE WOJCIECHOWSKI

Often, first loves remain tucked away in people’s memories. But sometimes they reconnect, and the results can be explosive. That’s the premise of Something Wilder, the latest romance novel by Christina Lauren, the powerhouse writing team of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings.

“[The book] is our love letter to the movies of our childhood, like Romancing the Stone, Indiana Jones and Goonies,” says Billings. “It’s the story of two long-lost loves who are thrown together on what they think is a fake treasure hunt, and when everything goes sort of horribly and hilariously wrong, they think there might be real treasure out there. They have to figure out if they’re going to go for it. I like to think of it as an action-packed romantic comedy.”

Finding friends in fandom

Although they have written dozens of books together, Billings and Hobbs don’t live in the same state: Billings lives in California and Hobbs is in Utah. The two met while writing fan fiction online in 2009.

“I’d never written for fun before, and it wasn’t until I discovered fan fiction that I realized I had anything to say,” says Hobbs.

After reading each other’s stories online for about a month, they wrote a short story together. That’s when the magic began. “We were so naive. We said, ‘Let’s write a book now,’ thinking that was the logical next step,” explains Billings.

That first book is the only unpublished one they’ve co-written, but it did land them their agent. By May 2023, they will have written 30 books together, with 29 published and 18 hitting the New York Times bestseller list.

Their process

While they usually write two novels a year, when they started out, Hobbs and Billings wanted to have a backlist of books. So they wrote and published six books in one year—while raising families and working full time at other jobs: Hobbs in a junior high counseling office and Billings, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, at a pharmaceutical company doing research on retinal degeneration.

Hobbs usually visits California for a few days when they’re fleshing out a story. “It’s a mix of hanging out, spending time together as friends and then talking about the book,” Billings says. Once they know who their characters are and what the general plot is, they create an outline. Then, they split up the book, with each of them writing every other chapter. And they edit a lot.

Something Wilder came from Billings’ desire not to write a story taking place indoors after COVID lockdowns. “We had been tinkering with a treasure-hunting story for a while,” she says. “The Wilder Ranch is based on a dude ranch that my family and I used to go to every summer.”

For Hobbs, one of the best parts of being half of Christina Lauren is getting to read Billings’ words first. “Sometimes, I’ll read a sentence she’s written, and honestly have to step away for a minute because she’ll phrase something in a way that absolutely blows my mind. It’s been like that since day one,” she says.

Billings feels the same: “We just really click. We have complementary personalities—I’m intense, and she’s laid-back. She’s absolutely my best friend.”

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Michele Wojciechowski is a national award-winning freelance writer based in Baltimore.

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