I'm Andrew. I'm a freelance journalist.

An article I wrote about Hello Sunday Morning and its founder, Chris Raine, was published in Qweekend magazine yesterday (June 4 2011). The cover looked like this.

You can read the full story, 'The Long Dry Spell', here.

This was a big story for me, for a few reasons. One, because it was the first time I'd been published in Qweekend - a magazine I've read and admired for years, and one that I've been attempting to get published in for around two years. So it was a massive thrill to see my name within those pages.

Two, because I'd been aware of Chris and his blog since he first started it, in early 2009. I have a feeling I heard about it through a Brisbane blogged named Hannah Suarez. The concept intrigued me. A young guy - a year older than me - giving up booze for a year, and blogging about it. Something I'd never considered. Throughout that year, I watched Chris grow as a writer and as a person. I hadn't met him. (That wasn't until mid 2010.) But I got some strange, voyeuristic thrill from reading about the challenges that he came up against, as a young, sober Australian.

As a journalist, I had wanted to tell Chris' story for quite some time. Looking at my email history now, I can see that I pitched the story "'Hello Sunday Morning', challenging adolescent perceptions of binge drinking" to Qweekend on February 17 2010, and to The Big Issue on February 25 2010. I didn't get a reply from the editor/s at either publication, despite following up (via email) twice with each publication/editor. I wasn't discouraged. I had faith in the idea.

Looking back now, the story probably wasn't quite ready to be told at that time, as Chris only had a dozen or two bloggers on board (and over 600 Facebook fans). The HSM seed had been planted, but it had only just begun to inch above the earth.

On April 4 2011, I met with the new editor of Qweekend. He had recently been appointed to that role after the founding editor, Christine Middap, accepted an offer to edit The Weekend Australian Magazine. Christine had guided Qweekend for five years, and established it as a source of quality, Queensland-focused journalism. Her successor, Matthew Condon, asked me to present him some story ideas. Of the dozens that I showed him that day, the Hello Sunday Morning story idea excited him the most.

I met with Chris Raine on April 6 to tell him the news, and that I wanted to spend some time following him around as he steered this idea, HSM, deeper into Australian youth culture. He gave me an overview of the economic and political landscape surrounding the Australian alcohol industry. He recommended some people to speak with. I interviewed them and made my own connections, too. I watched four groups of final year PR students at QUT pitch the HSM concept to Chris in very different ways. I listened to how he spoke about the idea, and how he interacted with people. I interviewed eight HSMers about their experiences. I interviewed Chris in his living room over French martinis.

Not all of these moments made it into the story that was published yesterday. This is the nature of journalism; it's not always possible to coherently fit in every memorable moment into every single story. This is the hardest part of writing, I find: choosing what to leave out.

The section below ended the final draft of the story that I filed to my editor. It had to be cut due to space restrictions. So I thought I'd begin my own three-month HSM - I'm now two days in, having spent yesterday sober, too - by showing you how I had intended to end the Qweekend story.

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I next meet Raine for coffee and sandwiches early one weekday in Fortitude Valley. It's about as far from a boozy Saturday night as possible. Raine is wearing shorts, running shoes and a HSM-branded singlet; he intends to hit the gym at midday. I have a burning question on my mind.

"How do you think I'd go with a HSM?" I ask.

"You?" he replies. "You'd kill it. You'd be awesome. Most people who do HSM don't need to do it. You're not a person who needs to do it, but the more people like you get involved, share your achievements and what you go through - that's really powerful.

"I ask people sometimes: 'What would it take for you to do a HSM?' But it's not like there's a strategy. People know what's right for them. I don't want people to do it because I've told them to do it; I want them to do it because they felt like it's the right thing to do. Not drinking for three months is a really cool thing to do. It's still really challenging for me."

"I think I'm ready to try it," I say.

"Awesome, man. What do you want to get out of it?"

"That's a tough question," I admit. "My current relationship with alcohol isn't problematic at all. I enjoy having a couple of beers here and there. I rarely get drunk. I don't spend a lot of money on alcohol. I exercise regularly. I'll feel like a bit of a phony if I write this story about you, but I don't actually know what you've gone through."

"So it's just another experience, right?"

"Yeah."

He grins. "Awesome."