Theodore McCombs

@theodoremccombs.bsky.social

1064 Followers 398 Following

Writer, climate lawyer, opera enthusiast, ballet husband-man. Clarion ‘17. Published my first book, URANIANS, last year & working on the second 🪐🏳️‍🌈

The pun husky
Graphic with syllabus for workshop reading: "Week 1: Conflict & Exposition (Butler, Le Guin) // Week 2: Weird Narrators (McCracken, Wolfe) // Week 3: Time (Bender, Chiang) // Week 4: Speculative Sentences (Delany, Aira)"
Graphic ad for "Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Robots: Craft Lessons from Speculative Short Fiction," Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 PM MST | Online (February 11 - March 4, 2026). The graphic shows a pulp magazine cover from December 1926 with a giant robot towering over houses, illustrating Edmond Hamilton's story "The Metal Giants"
Text: “It is easy to see why Luther’s marriage (as he called it) or Luther’s “abominable bichery” (if you prefer) became almost a symbol.”
A trash can with a special slot for recyclables that drops into the bin as the trash
Social media graphic for a four-week online course at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Robots: Craft Lessons from Speculative Short Fiction." Starting Wednesday, March 19 at 6:30 to 8:30 Mountain Standard Time.
Willem Dafoe as von Franz in “Nosferatu”
Wall art saying “embark on new adventures” and “let your inner compass point you in the right direction”
Illustration by G.K. Savitsky of Anton Chekhov's "The Black Monk," showing our overworked and nervous protagonist at his writing desk.
Still from Little Angle puppet theater's production of Gabriel García Márquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
Come write with me! "The Grit & the Pearl: Realist Stories with Unreal Centers," Sunday, December 8 on Zoom, 10AM to 12PM Mountain Time
The Virgin Mary, um, beckons? Offers her hand to the supplicant? Anyway it’s a side chapel at St Matthew’s Cathedral in D.C.
A diner menu quoting Jesus’s promise of the water of life before its ice cream and soda flavors
The author at the Nebulas doing his best Threepio impression with a cute Artoo unit
Excerpt of a review of URANIANS, focusing on the titular novella, by Jake Casella Brookins in the Chicago Review of Books
Eligibility post for SF/F awards listing the novella "Uranians" and the short stories "Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles" and "Alien vs. Bachelorette" by Theodore McCombs, on a background of the author in his Urania drag look.
Poster of the 2000 film “The Others” with a mysteriously shocked-looking Nicole Kidman
Statues of two men (lawyers?) playing chess, except someone’s nicked the chessboard
Painting of Newcastle harbor under impossibly bright moonlight, with coal fires raging under black smoke in the far right of frame
Screenshot of this week’s horoscope for Aquarius in them.us
Screen cap of a Book Riot article listing URANIANS as “one of those books I simply cannot stop screaming about.”
My cat Kamala basking in our new A/C window unit
“Hence [the soul] laments in the Book of Love, ‘The form of my beloved passed me by and I cannot follow him.’ To this passing she is self-condemned, following the spoor of her quarry, Christ.”
Quote from Robert Henri: “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”