By Shannon Hicks

The Shoreline Arts Alliance announced the winners of the 7th Annual Tassy Walden Awards: New Voices in Children’s Literature on May 2, and this year a Sandy Hook resident has won one of the competition’s categories.

Carol Sims was the winner of the Young Adult/Teen Novel division for her story Candlewax.

Honorable mention went to Mary Elliott of Clinton, for The Golden Arm, and the category also honored Faith Hough of Branford (The Bee’s Hive) and Lucia Zimmitti of South Glastonbury (Headlines) as finalists.

The contest, open to writers and illustrators from the state of Connecticut, drew 154 submissions from authors and artists from around the state. Wins, honorable mentions, and finalists honors were also presented in the categories of Picture Book (text only), Illustrated Picture Book, Illustrators Portfolio, and Middle Grade Novel.

Begun in 2001, this program for New Voices in Children’s Literature is a statewide juried competition offering awards in five categories for writers and illustrators of children’s books. Its goals are to encourage and nurture the creation and publication of exceptional quality books for children.

Many past winners and finalists are currently under contract to be published. Deborah Freedman of Hamden, a 2003 winner in both Illustrated Picture Book and Illustrator’s Portfolio categories, is the latest Tassy Walden Award winner to be published. Her winning submission Scribbles has been published and was just released (literally just, on May 8) by Knopf Books for Young Readers.

Tassy Walden, for whom the contest is named, has been a generous and vital member of the Shoreline community for more than 40 years and her volunteerism with such organizations as Women & Family Life Center, Guilford Free Library, and Literacy Volunteers of America has all been aimed at enhancing and enriching the lives of children. For that reason, the Shoreline Arts Alliance contest to launch quality children’s literature was named in her honor.

The winners will be invited to read from their work or display their portfolio at the awards ceremony, which will be held May 23 at Blackstone Memorial Library in Branford. The evening will begin with a book sale and signing at 6:30 pm, when newly released children’s books written by former Tassy Award winners will be on sale and these authors will be available for book signings. A percentage of all sales will be donated to Shoreline Arts Alliance.

The awards ceremony will then begin at 7 pm.

Candlewax is a story about 16-year-old Princess Catherine of Crystallia, who is promised to marry the Candlewax King — a man she has never met — but decides to take her jewels from the castle vault, disguises herself as a boy in order to get past guards, and runs away. Her plan is to live a life of leisure on the island of Alliana.

But like most best-laid plans, Catherine’s do not exactly follow their projected course.

Instead she is stalked by a rare fairrier cat named Spelopokos (rhymes with Galapagos), knocked off her horse, robbed, and eventually finds out that she is in fact Catherine of the Amulet and has a major role to play in a sacred prophecy. This realization, and the fact that the young girl and the mysterious creature have linked destinies, sets in motion an adventure that takes them to new places, meeting new people and strange creatures, and having quite a journey. There is plenty of action and adventure, and even a little romance between Catherine and a king.

Mrs Sims, who lives in Sandy Hook with husband Bill and their sons Billy, 18, and Henry, 16, has been creating Candlewax stories for years.

“The book grew out of years of telling stories to my children,” she said. “I started telling Candlewax stories when the boys were very young. We’d be home alone, my husband would be working late, so it made dinners much more fun. They used to get all excited and ask for new stories.”

The book, which currently numbers about 500 pages (“But I don’t know where it will edit out at the end,” said Mrs Sims), will be good for young adults of both genders. It has 60 chapters, but they vary in length from many to just a few pages each.

“Even though it’s full of adventure, there is also a lot of romance in it,” says Mrs Sims. “I don’t have girls; I had a male audience listening to me while I was creating many of these adventures, so I think there are some things that boys will really appreciate.”

Catherine, the book’s heroine, is a good role model.

“She’s a strong young woman,” said Mrs Sims, “but she doesn’t do it all on her own. She has a lot of help, she can accept help. The evil they have to overcome is so horrific, she couldn’t do it on her own, although she has a key role.”

Mrs Sims has always had artistic output in one form or another. While in middle school she did “lots of writing,” she said, but once she hit high school she pulled out her easel and switched to painting.

“To this day, my family thinks of me as a painter, not a writer,” said Mrs Sims, who has been an assistant editor for Antiques and The Arts Weekly (the sister paper of The Newtown Bee) since early 1999. “Painting is something I have to do when I’m very happy. Painting, for me, is a blissful activity that comes with a peaceful heart.

“I know others do paint through despair, but I can’t.”

Another mark that sets Mrs Sims’s creative process apart from most others is that when it comes to writing, at least with Candlewax, she flies without a net: Mrs Sims doesn’t work from an outline.

“There’s no way I could have outlined this book,” she admitted. There wasn’t a time where she felt overwhelmed with the direction the story was taking.

“It didn’t feel like ‘How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that?’” she said. “I wrote as long as inspiration carried me. Then I would go back and reread what I had done and pick up from there.

“I can’t write with an outline. I just have to let the story go,” she continued. “I think it’s a lot more fun to write that way, although I’m sure other writers can’t imagine going without one.”

Although she had been creating Candlewax stories for her boys for years, it was only about three years ago that Mrs Sims began serious work on what became her first award-winning story.

Many people would be surprised to learn that after spending so much time on a computer during the day, Mrs Sims would look forward to going home and spending more time working… on a computer.

“It’s a different kind of exhaustion when you’re writing on a computer versus working on a computer in an office,” she explained. “Some nights I would turn the computer off at 11 pm and be so tired, and other nights I could just keep going.

“This story was so much fun to write. It just flew right out,” she said. “It was a great change of pace. I would go to work and then go home and have this fantasy novel to come home to. There were times when I would look over at my laptop and this little light would be pulsing, inviting me to work.”

Based in Guilford, Shoreline Arts Alliance is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that cultivates artistic activity of the highest caliber in the central Shoreline region of Connecticut by presenting performances by local, national and international artists; by sponsoring competitions and other activities to encourage and educate artists and arts participants of all ages; by assisting affiliated arts organizations; and by helping to build the infrastructure of the arts on the Shoreline.

Tassy Walden Award winners each receive a cash prize, publicity including contact with five to ten selected publishers, and the opportunity to present to a school or library audience.

“It’s nice to have someone else read and enjoy your work,” Mrs Sims said of her honor. “There is a small cash prize, but it’s also some validation and that’s so important. Someone else likes your work.”

One of the best honors may have already come for Mrs Sims, however. When her son Billy heard his mother’s end of the phone conversation that took place when someone from Shoreline Alliance called with the news of the award, he ran downstairs to where his mother was, in the kitchen.

“He heard what was happening, came running downstairs, and gave me a big hug,” Mrs Sims said.