I started writing Nemesis a decade or so ago. While the essence of the story was the same, so many things about it have changed.

Back then, Dave's name was Leo. Leo was a far more aggressive, macho type of character than Dave. When I began to rewrite the story from the beginning, a bit less than three years ago, I found that Leo had changed so drastically as to be almost unrecognisable, and his name had to change. Dave just felt right, somehow.

Nick has always mirrored me, to a certain extent. When I created him, at fourteen, his big interests were anime and Harry Potter. He wrote poetry and would, in some sort of dramatic gesture, recite the poetry out loud to himself. But the Nick I write now is a songwriter rather than a poet, his great passion is music and his favourite book is, just like mine, American Gods.

He's also much better as standing up for himself, quicker and cleverer.

I was always terrible at clever comebacks when I was in school, and if It hadn't been for my friends I wouldn't have made it through those years. But Nick doesn't have any friends. It was suddenly clear to me that he needed some more street smarts if he were to survive school without the safety net of friends. So, instead of being the sad loser that everyone picked on, Nick had to become a loner by choice. A non-conformist. Not good at making friends, but getting by without them.

In the original story, Leo was very much superior in every respect. However, Dave meets Nick half-way. They're more evenly matched.

The minor characters have also evolved. They were, originally, far flatter, and the antagonists didn't really have motivations. That all changed when I took a leaf out of Neil Gaiman's book, literally.

Neil says in his introduction to American Gods that when he wasn't sure what was going to happen next, he wrote one of the Coming to America stories (stories about how people ended up taking their gods, superstitions and deities with them to the new world), and when he'd finished, he knew exactly what was supposed to happen in the main story.

Whenever I wasn't sure who a minor character was or what their motivations were, I sat down and began penning a short story exploring that character's origins or an episode from his or her life, and when that story was finished, I suddenly knew exactly what that character would do in any given situation. I call the collection of these short stories Hubris.

I shall leave you (if anyone is reading this at all) with the rather embarrassing first paragraph of the original Nemesis, exactly as I wrote it ten years ago:

Cheerio! Going to sleep now.