Marguerite Mignorance said:
"I'm becoming more and more inclined to just write what I want to write, and tell the publishers and readers to figure it out for themselves."
That's certainly what I'd do. You have to know publishers' categories to know what they're seeking, but I wouldn't write according to what publishers wanted - I'd write according to what my characters wanted, and then go looking for a publisher that wanted the same thing as my characters did.
(Though I do check wordage requirements ahead of time.)
"I guess I thought all 'slash' was gay fanfic"
Welcome to the terminology wars. :) Here are some various ways in which slash has been defined:
1) Fan works in which heterosexual male characters in the media are imagined as experiencing same-sex attraction.
This is the original definition, and everyone agrees on that one.
2) Fan works in which heterosexual male characters in the media or in literature are imagined as experiencing same-sex attraction.
This definition is accepted by most fan fiction writers, but it is *not* accepted by most fan video creators (as I discovered when I hung out with those folks, mentioned that I had written slash fan fiction based on literature, and was asked, "So, have you written any fan fiction?").
3) Fan works in which heterosexual male or female characters in the media or in literature are imagined as experiencing same-sex attraction.
Femslash is included here. Old-timers hold out against this definition.
4) Fan works in which male or female characters in the media or in literature are imagined as experiencing same-sex attraction.
The requirement that the characters be heterosexual in the original story is dropped. Queer As Folk fan fiction is considered slash under this definition. Old-timers hold out against this definition.
5) Same-sex attraction works that are aimed at slash readers/viewers. Divided into "original slash" and "slash fan works."
This is my definition. It's very practical, and you don't have to argue over whether slash works have some inherent quality that makes them different from gay works.
6) Same-sex attraction works that are aimed at female readers/viewers.
I don't like this definition because (1) it disses the male slash fans and (2) how does one then differentiate between slash and yaoi? Nonetheless, this is how the word is being used by some small presses: as a synonym for yaoi.
7) Same-sex attraction works.
I haven't met any thinking person who likes this definition, but a lot of younger readers are using it this way.
* * *
Differences between slash and same-sex genre romance: I know these only because they've come up in discussions here. I haven't actually read any genre romance, unless one counts Mary Stewart and Diana Gabaldon.
1) No HEA requirement in slash.
2) Darker topics are not only acceptable but highly popular. Some slash publications have a "no darkfic" requirement, and there are certainly plenty of "fluff" slash stories out there that are happyhappyhappy. But (unlike in genre romance publishing), in most slash zines, submissions of erotic stories on rape, torture, and/or death would be considered perfectly acceptable. This is because . . .
3) Slash grew up as a fan genre. For this reason, early on, it developed a subgenre called hurt/comfort: one of the characters is hurt, and his lover comforts him. (In darkfic, the hurter and the comforter are sometimes the same.) You can't really understand slash unless you understand how wildly popular hurt/comfort is in the slash world. And the reason that hurt/comfort is popular is that the early TV shows that were slashed were big on hurt/comfort. Practically the only time that the guys in these shows demonstrated emotion toward one another was when one of them had been hurt. If you attend a slash video program, what you'll see is one long series of videos in which a character is in a hospital bed, while his friend holds his hand. Slashers treat this comforting as subtext for the characters falling in love with one another (or deepening their love).
I gather that there are genre romance equivalents to this - the maiden being carried off by pirates, ravished, and then comforted by the hero - but I don't get the impression that hurt/comfort plays nearly as central a role in genre romance as it does in slash.
"provide an example synopsis of a slash type story, and explain what about it qualifies it for the slash category."
Sure. Here is
The Administration series by Manna Francis (here's the
site warning page), the first volume of which will be
published this fall in print. The author started off in the Blake's 7 fandom, which is one of the oldest fandoms. Her setting for The Administration is clearly indebted to Blake's 7, as is the general violent atmosphere of her series.
Here are the slash criteria again:
1) No HEA requirement. The series as a whole is HFN, and most of its readers agree that the main characters teeter on the point of disaster. Individual stories within the series are too gloomy to qualify as HFN.
2) Darker topics are acceptable. Yeah, boy.
3) Hurt/comfort is often central. Indeed. The main character is a torturer who must struggle to come to terms with the demands of love that he can't understand, for the simple reason that he is a psychopath. Needless to say, he does a lot of hurting in the series, including to his lover. He also gets hurt a lot by his enemies. However (unlike in a lot of gay porn), the violence isn't there just to paint a gloomy/gritty picture. The series keeps coming back to the healing process - to the post-hurt comfort serving as a way to bind the protagonist closer to his lover. (Surprise, surprise, they're in a BDSM relationship together.)
I doubt very much that this series could be published by the average genre romance publisher. It's too dark, its happiness is too much mixed in with sadness, and I don't know whether genre romance readers would understand the themantic importance of all those moments of hurt/comfort. Hopefully they would - good literature reaches beyond genre boundaries. But I think it would be a case like Diana Gabaldon's novels, where the genre romance readers accepted the novels *despite* the fact that the novels broke genre romance conventions, not because of that fact.