For this issue, we’re trying something a little different. Many of you know Russ Youngblood as the longtime photographer whose images have helped define the look and spirit of David Magazine for years. But behind the camera, Russ has also been exploring a new creative path – writing. Inspired by early morning walks along the Spanish Sitges coast and a lifelong connection to journalism through his family’s newspaper roots, Russ has begun work on a novel. Below you’ll find a small excerpt from the opening of Chapter One, offering just a taste of the story he’s building. The full first chapter is available to read online, and as Russ continues writing, we’ll be sharing future chapters with readers as they become available.
An excerpt from The Hotel Santa Anna by Russ Youngblood
Chapter One
The Grand Dame
The Mediterranean had a unique way of waking up. Other oceans announced themselves. They crashed and roared, flung salt into the air demanding applause. They arrived loudly declaring their presence. But the sea along the Sitges beachfront greeted the morning like a shy lover—soft, tentative—sending small, glimmering waves up the sand asking permission with each caress. The water lingered only briefly before retreating, embarrassed by its own boldness.
It was the kind of dawn that made even hardened fishermen pause to watch pale sunlight filtering through the mist.
Poets tried to describe it, inevitably failing with running purple prose.
And the Hotel Santa Anna sat directly in its path, swallowing the early light whole.
She had been built during a time when grand hotels were not simply places to sleep but declarations—monuments to optimism, leisure, and the radical belief that beauty alone justified existence. When the Santa Anna first opened her doors, Sitges was still a working coastal village shaped by fishing boats, vineyards, and devotion. Nets were mended at dawn. Saints were honored. Lives followed narrow, inherited paths, their rhythms set by tides and bells.
But the sea had never respected borders.
Artists arrived before the century turned.
They came first from Barcelona, then farther afield—painters, writers, thinkers drawn by a quality of light that behaved differently here. Sitges held the sun, scattering it across whitewashed walls and open water until colors deepened and shadows softened. Time itself seemed to relax, as if it, too, had come on holiday and forgotten when it was meant to leave.
Santiago Rusiñol, the painter, made Sitges his refuge and his rebellion, turning the town into a living canvas for Modernisme. Others followed—artists who believed beauty should not be confined to galleries, that art could shape not only how one saw the world, but how one lived inside it. A movement of sound, color and thought.
The Hotel Santa Anna was the willing witness.
Not consciously. Not sentimentally. Faithfully.
Men paid for rooms with sketches instead of money. Women smoked too much and laughed too loudly. Conversations spilled late into the night, drifting from balconies like music and refusing to be contained by walls. New ideas arrived in the guise of bad habits and stayed long enough to become traditions.
The town listened. History, of course, pressed back.During the long years of dictatorship, Sitges learned restraint. Public life returned to respectability. Carnaval vanished from the streets, surviving quietly in kitchens, behind closed shutters, in stories told softly so they would not be overheard. Artists remained, but learned when to lower their voices. Theaters dimmed, then reopened carefully. Lives continued, but contained, coded, resilient.
The Santa Anna adapted as buildings do—with quiet patient endurance.
She housed guests who arrived under assumed names. Couples who requested separate beds and pushed them together anyway. Actors who rehearsed lines into mirrors long after the lobby lights were dark. People who needed discretion more than luxury, safety more than spectacle.
She did not judge. She endured. And she kept their secrets.
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Do you want the rest of the first chapter of The Hotel Santa Anna by Russ Youngblood? Check it out here, and stay tuned for more exclusive chapters from Russ.