I've been writing pretty much since I could put words together - my first poem was dictated to my grandmother when I was about 3.5, just after I got my first cat. I wrote my first book in 7th grade so that would be 13 or so. I still have that one - it's a fantasy and pretty terrible (though good for my age I was told). I wrote the first half of my second book directly after and this is one of my biggest mistakes and regrets in all my years of writing - I literally threw it away.
I know it took place in the Maldives because I had this oversized illustrated atlas and it was the most foreign, most interesting place in it (this was before I had access to the Internet). I know it was a horror story that contained a series of murders. I know I threw it away because it creeped me out. Me. The girl who spent lunch periods reading Silence of the Lambs (and that one got a phone call to my mother). The girl who bought an extra pregnant shark in biology class earlier that same year to do a proper autopsy style dissection on the table in my grandfather's funeral home.
I've spent years looking for a book that replicated that feeling - being utterly creeped out, the kind of creeped out that crawls in to the blood and festers. Years. And I had it right in front of me, from my own mind and I have very little idea of what it was that got under my skin so badly that I had to throw it away.
I know there was a girl who found the body of her best friend, partly decomposed and explained in as much detail as a child with no access to the sort of research that would make that realistic could do. I have no other recollection of the story. What I wouldn't give to remember that story - specifically what it was that made it different from all the rest of my stories, of the many many horror novels I read in that year, the following years, that never got to me so badly that I threw it out. Maybe someday I'll remember but until I do, my biggest regret in my writing life will be throwing that away.