GENRE: Humor, SEL
WORDS: 408
Query:
Dear Judges, Agents, and Editors,
Thank you so much for participating in PBParty! I hope you enjoy ROOMMATEZZZ, a 408-word humorous picture book for children 3-6.
Baths take forever, waste water, and give you pruney fingers! So, I stopped taking them. Everything was pretty sweet until The Big STINK. That’s when Maude, Claude, Todd, and Sebastian-Erickson moved in. Now I have to decide between keeping my new fly roommates and (ugh) taking a bath…
ROOMMATEZZZ combines the humorous bath avoidance of 101 Reasons Why I’m Not Taking a Bath (Stacy McAnulty, Joy Ang) with the exploration of awkward roommate challenges from Hamsters Make Terrible Roommates (Cheryl B. Klein, Abhi Alwar).
With a background in both preschool and elementary education as well as being a parent, I have spent many years working with, playing with, and reading books to children. I am also a member of SCBWI and an active participant in Julie Hedlund’s 12×12 Picture Book Challenge. I have honed my skills via myriad writing courses through NYC’s Gotham Writers’ Workshop and through collaboration with numerous critique partners. I was also a winner in both the 2024 and 2025 #ChuckleChallenge contests.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Excerpt:
Meet Maude, Claude, Todd, and Sebastian-Erickson, the flies who live in my room.
They used to live outside…
until I stopped taking baths.
Don’t look at me like that.
Baths took too much time. (I had things to do!)
Baths wasted water. (Shouldn’t we be nice to the Earth?)
Baths made me wrinkly. (Pruney fingers are weird.)
So, no more baths for me.
Everything was great! Until…
The Big STINK.
What inspired you to write this story & what do you have in common with it:
ROOMMATEZZZ was inspired by helping my son work through bath resistance. We knew a bath was healthy for him. He knew it was the LAST thing he wanted. And the same conversations occurred…every. single. night. One particularly frustrating evening, I adlibbed a scenario to my son in which he did not, in fact, take the bath that his father and I wanted him to take. And soon he would get so stinky from avoiding baths that flies would move in because they would love the smell sooo much. He giggled and agreed to a bath. It was magic!
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