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It takes as much stress to be a success as it does to be a failure.
-Emilio James Trujillo

Following Your Heart! The Kindness of Strangers - Chasing the Dragon’s Long Tail
For some unknown cultural reason we have not been taught and reinforced to address our emotional health in the same manner as our physical health. Migrants are often its greatest victims of that stange cold feeling in the bones. Loneliness must be one of the most painful experiences of life. It can gnaw away at the very soul of a person's being. What is tragic is that, when a lonely person becomes desperate for human contact, others often sense it and are scared off or repulsed by it. The lonely soul hence becomes the avoided soul and so a downward spiral begins which can push people to despair ... In a surreal way, if you try to tell your story with too much passion you could easily end up with sea of rejection letters from publishers. In fact, some editors in the industry might even accuse you of spamming and pour Cold Water on your literary baby. Even if you dare to sent them a mere single email informing them about the birth of your story ... However, every negative has a positive we just have to look for it ;-)

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired Magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. A former Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” Hugh Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever. And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7." Long Tail in publishing is larger than the Dragon head

• Can you ever think too much about freedom? Not in my book. Cold River is of such cruel destruction that it will sweep anyone away Cold River: Paperback Edition

• Michael Schaefer - March 2005: Riding the dragon: Cold River accorded a place of honor among some heavyweight tomes at DeepBlog Books
• Michael Schaefer - May 2005 Why I Blog

• Margo Kingston - August 2005: Personal opening statement to Webdiarists
• Webdiary - August 2005: Dream as if you'll live forever and live as if you'll die today

• Jay Rosen - February 2005 I like Media Dragon


• Trevor Cook - September 2005: The state of Australian blogging
• Hugh Martin - The Age - May 2005: When are bloggers journalists?

• Tim Dunlop - January 2003: Jozef Imrich is a sort of Mitteleuropa Instapundit

• Shel Israel and Robert Scoble ... “Sunlight is the best disinfectant -- all great CEOs encourage transparency and openness as long as sensitive data is not leaked,” Cold River author Jozef Imrich told us Naked Thorns in the Roses

• Shel Israel and Robert Scoble - February 2005: Red Couch

• Shel Israel and Robert Scoble - August 2005: Acknowledgements

• Shel Israel and Robert Scoble - October 2005: The Media Dragon Loves us

• Dan Gillmor - July 2005 Citizen Journalist: Bayosphere

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Cold River, a kind of story for readers who thirst after existential foreign non-fiction - a fluid memoir You are different. So is Cold River

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Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family—but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
-Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

In the woods it is surreal. Just like in life, one moment we are in almost blinding sunlight, the next pitched under a dark blanket where the temperature is ten degrees cooler ... I am neither a man nor a woman but a sole survivor

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Drowned' man resurfaces 22 years later
When I was about to turn 40 - 40 is huge as life begins at 40 - I thought, what are you waiting for? My next life? So I made a vow to myself that I would try to get my sad story across the Iron Curtain published. Indeed, Cold River is latest in long line of surreal and tragic embodiments of ordinary man that have, in loneliness, defeat and occasional glory, populated Central European stories. Rowing, like writing, is like that, it's a constant interplay of thought and emotion between boat and rower caught in the (im)perfect storm, which, to ignore, could in fact be dangerous to the rower

We freeze some moments in time. Every country has its frozen moments, events so tragic and personal that they transcend the normal flow of stories. Can one person make a difference? It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind.

• Cold River is a surreal slice of Iron Curtain Every exit is an entry somewhere else [Towards Colder Rivers]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi