on the third hand

John Scalzi and Cat Valente have been talking about short fiction rates (as an outgrowth of John's muck-raking posts about a market which pays 1/5 of a cent per word), and since my experience as a short story writer has been quite different from either John's or Cat's, I thought I'd weigh in with the view from here.

I should say three things up front:

1. I am both a novelist and a short story writer (whereas, in the grossly over-simplified version John is a novelist who sometimes writes short s...