At one point I wrote an original fic, the plot of which was that the narrator was attempting to prove that another character had murdered his male lover. The sexuality of the narrator himself was left to the reader's imagination, but I found myself writing the "canonically" bisexual murderer flirting with the narrator, and doing various other things that created what one would call slashy subtext.

I finished the story, and was happy with it. Do you know what I did next?

I wrote slash for it. Yes, I slashed my own original fic. And it simply wouldn't have *worked* as "canon", as part of the initial story, because to me, slash depends on having something pre-existing to riff on. It's a comment on a text, not a stand-alone text in itself.

Now, you could conceivably write slash that's commenting not on a particular text, but on a whole genre of literature. And I think that exists in some gay sci-fi stories, which comment on the subtextual elements (and strangely traditional het archetypes) of sci-fi in general. But to me, it ain't slash unless you're commenting on something. That's the heart of it.