San Antonio Author Jerry Gutierrez

Writing From a Life Perspective, and Beyond It

I’m Jerry Gutierrez.

I was born with a huge desire to create. Some of my earliest memories are of running through the neighborhood with my friends, putting on plays, making up shows, and finding any excuse to perform. Later, that creative pull became more formal. I joined the band and theater. I played saxophone on Sunday mornings at church. I eventually studied theater at St. Olaf College and performed in musicals, dance, and choir.

I guess you could say I have always been centered in the arts.

Although I never became a professional artist, the drive never left me. Sometimes it helped me during the hardest moments of life. Other times, during the greatest ones. Over time, I tried to reignite that creative part of myself, but the muscle was weak. My time became filled with family, bedtime stories, work, and the search for enough quiet at the end of the day to simply wind down.

A little over ten years ago, I decided writing might be the best way to scratch that creative itch. I had tons of ideas. I started many of them. But writing came with struggles I had not expected. I was not trained as a writer, and while I had ideas, the fuel driving the engine often ran out quickly. The technical side of writing, organizing, drafting, revising, and finishing became its own set of barriers.

Still, I kept trying. I wrote. I rewrote. I started again. I kept going.

In 2025, I finally finished my first book: All My Cake & What It Cost Me. I wrote it because I lived through it, but I finished it because I learned how to use a tool called AI. It helped me break through so many of the barriers that had stopped me before: organizing my thoughts, shaping the structure, pushing through drafts, and getting the words onto the page.

Since then, I have become an avid writer, storyteller, worldbuilder, and, dare I say, a bit of a sage. I have been able to write, plan, and begin stories across other genres, from memoir and personal growth to science fiction, gothic horror, and beyond.

I hope you find a few answers here. More than that, I hope you join me along the way as I share the personal journey of how I wrote my first book, how I am approaching my second book, a science fiction space opera about found family, and how I am continuing to uncover and experiment with AI across several areas of art and creativity.