Patricia Sereno
Author · Astrologer · MusicianBehind the Smoke
Behind the smoke is the place where I live and write.
This isn’t a confession. It’s my origin story.
The stories, the art, the music all rise from the same source. It comes from my belief that creativity doesn’t just express who we are; it transforms us into who we become.
The Global Wanderer
I’ve never belonged to one place for long.
The map of my life is written in departures and arrivals. City skylines fading through train windows, border stations blurring past in the night. Sometimes it was flight instead of rail, leaving England’s green and crowded streets, flying for hours over nothing but sand and silence until the plane door opened onto heat that felt like an oven.
Each journey touched me differently. And somewhere between, beneath foreign skies, I began to understand what it means to belong nowhere.
Every border taught me something new: how to listen, how to disappear into a crowd, how to reinvent myself without losing the pulse of who I was inside. I learned early that movement isn’t always escape. Sometimes it’s the only way to find inner stillness.
The women I write about live that truth. They cross countries and identities with forged papers and fragile hearts, searching not for safety but for freedom and to be seen for who they are. Perhaps that’s why their stories feel like memory, fragments of the same map I’ve followed all my life.
“I write for those of us who live in the margins, the unseen and misunderstood, the ones who learned to lock their truths away just to be safe.”
Identity & Resonance
Beneath every title I’ve ever worn—writer, musician, astrologer, survivor—there has always been the same pulse: a need to tell the truth. Especially when it’s inconvenient.
Being queer taught me that truth has a price. Sometimes silence, sometimes solitude, sometimes the quiet kind of courage no one sees. The world prefers its women soft, compliant, and easy to understand. I’ve never been any of those things.
My queerness isn’t a label I wear. It’s the lens through which I see everything, the way love becomes resistance, and existence becomes its own kind of art. It’s in every story I write and every silence I’ve ever broken with a pen.
The Inner Landscape
Everyone lives with an edge; a fault line they spend a lifetime learning to navigate. For me, it is the mind itself: mercurial, untamed, lit by a light so brilliant it burns and shadowed by a dark abyss that, when I’m there, feels eternal. Balance, when it comes, is a place I visit, not where I live.
My creativity and spirituality became the way I learned to walk that edge, to turn its volatility into rhythm and its chaos into beauty. When the world feels too sharp, too bright, or too dark, I pour that energy into words, sound, or colour. Expression grounds me; it keeps me tethered to something reliable in this world.
Creativity becomes an instrument of transformation, giving that edge form, a shape I can live with, and sometimes, even love.
The Artist’s Path
My work moves across form — story, poetry, sound, colour, and one-to-one interpretive work — but it all begins in the same place.
I’ve always loved creating stories shaped like mandalas where beauty and awareness meet. That same impulse guides my colouring books and journals, offering space for reflection, healing, and a quiet return to self.
The Celtic harp found me in my early thirties, but it felt like remembering something ancient. An instrument as old as story itself, its sound has long been tied to spiritual and emotional healing. My compositions are written to calm the mind, open the heart, and bring the listener into a gentle state of awareness, a place between thought and stillness.
Astrology has always been part of my practice, another way of tracing the patterns between what is visible and what is possible.
Across every form my art begins in the same place: the desire to create something beautiful enough to help someone breathe a little easier.
The Mirror Between Me and My Characters
Every character I write carries a piece of me. Refracted, disguised, sometimes distorted, but never false. Sam’s defiance, Cat’s truth, Elena’s poise, Liliana’s justice, and Laurent’s restraint all exist in that quiet tension between concealment and revelation.
Through them, I express what life once denied me: the chance to flourish despite what tried to break me, to claim the justice the world withheld, and to rewrite endings in my favour. Writing lets me step out of silence without being seen, to turn what once bound me into something that moves, speaks, and refuses to disappear.
Like me, they live in-between. Between borders, between selves, between who the world expects and who they must become to endure. Some wear disguise as protection. Others build it into their names, their clothes, their voices. I learned to soften mine in certain rooms, to pass safely in a world that does not always forgive difference.
Through them, I remember that creation is resistance, and sometimes, the only kind of justice we ever get.
On Process
Creation begins in instinct. The rest is refinement. Everything I write begins with me. I may use artificial intelligence tools in the editorial process to refine and clarify. The work remains my own. The voice, the rhythm, the silences between. Each story is shaped further through human editing and narration.
Welcome to Sapphic Noir
I write for those of us who live in the margins, the unseen and misunderstood, the ones who learned to lock their truths away just to be safe. For those who have loved in silence, moved through danger with grace, and carried desire like contraband.
My stories are for anyone who ever looked over their shoulder before speaking their heart aloud and spoke it anyway. For those who know that love, in all its forms, is an act of rebellion.
Welcome to Sapphic Noir, where truth hides in plain sight, secrets become survival, and every woman carries a story the world tried to forget. If you recognize yourself here, know this: you were never invisible. You were only waiting to be seen.