We’re shutting things down around here for the rest of 2009 due to the holidays. But don’t worry, there will be lots more Word Pirates in 2010!

In the meantime, here is a free present, not from us but from Audiofiles Magazine. From now until December 29, you can download three free Sherlock Holmes mysteries from their website. The books are: Silver Blaze, The Adventure of the Stock-Broker’s Clerk, and The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.

Click here for the downloads.

I am getting them right now. I haven’t read any Sherlock Holmes since I was in junior high, so this should be fun.

Merry Christmas!

Hey Word Pirates, my short-short “Pie Man” is in the current issue of Rumble Magazine. Check out “Pie Man” here and then read the rest of the issue.

I love this picture of three little girls looking at “a heavily marked-up manuscript for “A Christmas Carol” that Charles Dickens wrote, and rewrote, in 1843.” It’s from a NYTimes piece about Dickens editing the famous Christmas tale, focusing on some of the smaller changes of the manuscript and its publishing history.

The NYTimes was also allowed to scan 66 pages from the book for their readers to view on the web, although I found them hard to access.

It shows how much a book can change, even up to the last minute. For example:

At least one change did not occur until the book was at the printer. You will note that the manuscript is silent on whether Tiny Tim lives. But before the first editions went out the door, a line was curiously inserted on page 65 noting that “and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.”

Citing a 2004 book by Michael Patrick Hearn, “The Annotated Christmas Carol,” Mr. Kiely said Dickens added that line as “an afterthought.”

Aren’t we glad he put that in?