Barbora, the Freelance Writer.
I am a historian, a writer, and a copywriter. I am the author of Ancient Slavic Origins, a book on the ancient history of Slavic nations. I write
Rebel History, a channel on history often left untold,
Alpine Skier, a channel for those, who love the white mountains,
Furthermore, I work for clients as a freelancer, including the Skiers Planet, whose articles I share with my readers.
My Story
I come from a city robbed of its history by the post-war era.
A city in the North of Bohemia, Liberec.
That might have been the source of my fascination with history from a young age.
At the age of twelve, I was reading biographies of Roman emperors by Allan Massie and Fury by Colin Falconer.
You can imagine the mess these books made in a teenager’s head.
But I was eager to learn, and my passion grew.
Writing: a digression or the highway?
As a child, I always carried a notebook and pen and wrote. I usually wrote “novels” - mostly unfinished, as I always succumbed to the desire to follow the new shiny idea. But I did finish one novel at the age of 10 and got it into a public library. The second novel waited ten years until its last lines were written. And I have never published it. As I grew up, I stopped believing. I have decided that I was not good enough and that writing is not a decent career, anyway.
Writing was always supposed to be a mere hobby. A digression that can never sustain me in life.
Thus, I entered the Faculty of Education to study English. You know, one can always earn a living by foreign languages.
However, when I sat in my first history class in 2006, and the teacher addressed us as “historians,” I felt my childhood passion grow again. Sure, writing academic texts is not “writing,” per se. But it is as close as can be and still be called a decent career. So, I pursued academic writing career as a historian.
Really? Can I be a historian? Can I dedicate my life to history as such? Let’s do this!
When you are twenty, you rarely think about what you will do in life. You should, but you don’t. At the age of twenty, you dream. My dream was to earn my living as a historian—to enter Ph.D. studies, and then… then we’ll see.
In 2013, I started my PhD studies in history at the Faculty of Education. At the same time, I began to teach English at a primary school.
Soon, I understood that I didn’t want to teach. I dedicated all my energy to my PhD studies and looked forward to my maternity leave when no daily job would take the precious time I wanted to spend writing my thesis.
At home with a child, I relished that all I had to do was take care of my youngster and finish my Ph.D. I studied with a kid on my lap, wrote papers, participated in conferences, and started teaching history at the Faculty of Education.
It was a paradise for me, and I did not want to lose it.
But even then, the dream grew a little darker. I knew that an academic career could not sustain me; University teachers in the Czech Republic are paid miserably.
And I soon discovered there was no place for creativity in the academic papers.
In 2020, I got my Ph.D. and realized with terror that I never thought beyond this moment.
And as my maternity leave drew to an end, I had to figure out what to do.
And first and foremost, what to do with history that I loved more than anything.
A Freelance Historian?
I have decided to run a freelance historian’s business. To teach history privately. I did not know what precisely to do, but I had a dream.
I heard from all sides how crazy the idea was.
But I had to try…
My first historical project grew in small steps. I had to learn everything from scratch: website building, marketing strategy, social media, graphics, e-book writing, podcasts, and running my own new business as a copywriter at the same time. Not to mention the kids.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that I was a writer. That people loved what I wrote, and suddenly I remembered. All this, teaching, academic career, copywriting, all of it was a digression. Writing was the highway; writing was my calling.
So, I sat down and started writing a book. I wrote for magazines and discovered that I could write about stuff I loved, not just the things I had studied.
And so, I finally call myself a writer
I write books about history, both non-fiction and fiction.
I am writing about skiing for people who love it.
And I write about anything else because creativity knows no bounds.
You can subscribe to all these publications or only choose one of them. It is up to you.
And follow me on my other channels:
