I saw this quote on TypeRacer:

and this other is from A.N.Palmer author of the Palmer Method of Business Writing:

And also don't hurt your hands by excessive training, take it easy and nice.

And with all that you need to be patient. Your progress looks quite fine to me.

Yeah, almost every time I go to TypeRacer I get a long enough passage that it's not likely that I'll be able to even finish it on time, and *then* it finally drops the speed.  But only after the time is completely up.  Wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that every time I go to the page it starts me back with the "normal" time limit, which is very annoying.  And the way the site is, if I ever click Back or Refresh (ie. to restart or get a new passage), back to square one.  Turning the time limit off completely would be nice.

Really, like I said, I've been avoiding it for all these reasons for the most part except for a daily check on progress.  It's good for when you already know how to type well (I used it to get a rough estimate of my QWERTY speed before abandoning it), but I've found typing things that I can easily bring back into my mind (lyrics) to be better since I'm not racing against the clock or hitting Backspace so much.

And actually... what you guys pointed out about repeating the same mistakes seems very likely when you consider the fact that so many words are completely or almost completely typed on the home row, and that's where most of my mistakes are.  In fact, in my time practicing, there were at least one or two mistakes I made that I immediately noticed and corrected, and some time later (a day or two) they popped up again as a real annoyance (ie. not just one-off mistakes anymore) out of nowhere.

I currently have Linux and BSD installed on my computer, so I doubt that Typing of the Dead is an option... sounds fun though.  Not sure if it would run in Wine or not.

I did some more practice with song lyrics earlier.  It must have been a good day, because I wasn't making near as many mistakes.  I decided, since this was one of my better days of practice, to do a quick test round on TypeRacer.

The results: 24WPM, 99.3% accuracy.  Still slow but better, and much better accuracy than I usually get on that site.  My QWERTY speed was generally around 50-60WPM (bursts of 65-70 or more on occasion) with nearly 100% accuracy every time before giving it up in case anyone is interested.

By the way, as I said in a previous post, I started with on-screen images and then later put some temporary stickers on the keys.  The last week or so I haven't even been looking down at the stickers, and as the home row stickers have been coming off I haven't been replacing them.  Now the home row lacks all the stickers except the -_ key (least used, hasn't come off yet).  Not sure if the other stickers are needed or not now, since I really don't even look at the keyboard when typing usually.  They're mostly useful for hitting shortcuts quickly, but I'm starting to remember the Dvorak shortcut keys by sight and by standard QWERTY letter now.

I originally decided to learn Dvorak as a secondary layout but within a couple days decided to abandon QWERTY.  I haven't really touched that layout for a while now for anything serious.  Yet I have been faced with the QWERTY layout a couple times now on occasion recently (VirtualBox virtual machines and DOSBox), and I can now barely type with it... I keep going for the Dvorak keys now... heh.  To avoid screwing with my Dvorak progress, I'm not making any attempt to keep my QWERTY skills up.

For Linux and Mac users, you can try web game like this site
http://www.freetypinggame.net/

There are about 10 different games and tests there, so you will likely have a fun time while practising.

I did another bunch of TypeRacer tests just a little bit ago.  I've found that I can much more reliably sustain a speed in the mid to high 20s (25-28WPM), and my highest was around 30-32WPM if I remember right.  Much less confusion after making mistakes as well as less time remembering the actual location of the keys means less time wasted trying to get back on track.  My accuracy was also pretty decent for the most part, and very good at times (but not quite as good as what I used to do on QWERTY).  My only practice lately has just been basically using Dvorak as my everyday layout.

I'm at about half or a bit more of my previous QWERTY typing speed... and it feels like once I get fully up to my old speed and get more of the combos down, I might be able to surpass it.  The reason: There seems to be far fewer aspects of typing with Dvorak that slow me down (weird sequences like row jumping, too-frequent use of hard to reach keys, etc.) compared to QWERTY, even at this relatively early stage.  That said, even if I don't actually get faster in the end, it's well worth it because it feels so much better.

The very last practice round was 30WPM @ 97.8% accuracy.