The Official Launch...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PHYTE Magazine has officially launched Steve Karmazenuk's new novel, Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind.

The novel is one of a series of innovative, new online-format features available exclusively from PHYTE Magazine, as it continues to create the New Mainstream.

Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind is the story of six friends from different backgrounds studying at—or coasting through—John Abbott College at the height of the Grunge Era in Montreal, from the years 1991 to 1994. What brings them together is their love of cigarettes, music, coffee, dope, sex and hanging out. The story revolves around events in each of the character’s lives as narrated from their individual points of view.

SOPHIE ROSAIRE is a raven-haired, voluptuous twenty-year-old with a severe allergy to committed relationships and a powerful thirst for adventurous sex. She loves her friends and will do anything for them - or with them, depending on her urges.

WILL BAKER is the nineteen year old lead singer/songwriter for the Psychic Circus, a college-bar band based out of Sainte Anne’s, John Abbott College’s home town. A heartbreaking betrayal briefly drives Will into Sophie’s arms - and bed - and this decision will change Will’s life forever.

PASCAL LEBRUN is twenty, the guitarist for Psychic Circus and Sophie’s oldest friend. He has been secretly in love with her for years, though he wouldn’t dare tell her. He suffers in silence through Sophie’s sexual escapades and likewise through his own painful, unsatisfying relationships with his family and his unfaithful and deceptively cruel girlfriend. Music is perhaps the only thing Pascal loves as much as he does Sophie, and he forms the Lennon half of a Lennon/McCartneyesque songwriting partnership with Will Baker.

JULIE KENNEDY is a seventeen year old suburban punk and drug addict, battling her habits and her boyfriend to regain her sobriety. The onetime drummer for the Psychic Circus, Julie is also so severely depressed that she embarks on a quest for new meaning in her life, a new thrill and a way to erase the dark times that still overshadow her.

BRIAN KLEIN is a preppy nineteen year old West Island boy, basing his image almost entirely on Luke Perry from Beverly Hills 90210, from his bleach-blonde pompadour to his extra-long sideburns. Brian is struggling with his burgeoning bisexuality and conflicting attractions for Alec Sorvino and Tanya Heihachi, two very opposite people, both in gender and attitudes.

JEFF MCBRIDE is Julie’s ex-boyfriend-to-be and the bassist and for Psychic Circus. Jeff is an opportunistic, amoral self-centered schemer who thinks nothing of using his friends and family, manipulating his girlfriend, or neglecting the band that he formed and helped lead to near-success if it means he can get high. His love of heroin and his penchant for petty crime will shape his destiny and the destiny of his friends in ways no one can hope to understand.

Together these six friends weave their way through interconnected adventures at times comic, tragic, erotic, deranged and incredible. Even as their lives diverge along different paths their love for one another keeps them in convergence through a period of time that culminates in Kurt Cobain’s suicide and with it the end of the Grunge Era in April of 1994.

The novel will be released at a rate of six chapters per month, available exclusively from PHYTE Magazine, at http://www.phyte.ca/nevermind/nevermind.html. Future plans include a trade paperback-format release of the complete novel.

Steve Karmazenuk lives in Montreal and works in telecommunications. He has written and published several articles and op-ed pieces. His first novel, The Unearthing is slated to be released later in 2006 by Publish America. Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind is available exclusively through PHYTE Magazine. He is married and lives with his wife and their seven cats, two birds and several fish.

For more information about PHYTE Magazine or Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind, contact PHYTE Magazine's Media Director, Kevin LeClair, at eon_5@msn.com