Hi. Just some background here. I've been typing on QWERTY since freshman year in highschool back in the mid 80's. I've never been able to get any speed at it. I've always been about 35 to 40 words per minute(with a lot of backspacing). I love to write but I can seem to get much into the computer.  Also in highschool I was diagnosed with juvenille arthritis in my right wrist and also contracted Rheumatic fever mostly on the right side of my body.

Reasons for not a fast typing speeds:
* can't stand mistakes so I'm always backspacing
* I've short pinkies; they come to just under the last knuckle of my ring finger (so of course reaching for the backspace I would have to move my right hand total off the keys then look to make sure that my right hand was back in place)
* with all of the stretching of my right hand I would get cramps in my hand from the ring finger to pinky.
* I work on a farm and clean a lot of stalls. My shoulders have more muscle than they did before so once my hands start cramping so do my elbows, wrists and shoulders. It's like a major chain reaction.

Well, I was surfing the web thinking about how much more comfortable the keyboards were when I learned to type. One was an old electric manual return typewriter in highschool and the other as an IBM keyboard in college. I came across an IBM keyboard that had been recapped for Dvarok and began to read up on it to see what it was. I had no clue at that time there was even such a thing as different keyboard layouts. The one thing that stood out was that Dvarok was suspose to provide less stress on your hand. I thought I would try it. I made some homemade keyboard lettering, made up a keyboard map so I could look at it and switched my language on my windows 8 laptop (I use a separate keyboard to type one my fingers fumble all over themselves on my laptop. I don't know why but they do. Maybe the flat keys?).

So I began to type(using lesson software). It was great no ache at all in my left hand. But I still got cramping in my right one after awhile. With in the week of trying to learn Dvarok I started out being able to type for about 30 minutes straight with out my hand starting to cramp. (This was great; 20 minutes of straigh typing on QWERTY was all I could have done before the cramps started) But by day 5, my right hand was begining to cramp in just under 10 mins. This wasn't going to work. I had thought about going back but when I was looking up Dvarok, Colemak kept popping up. Remembering this I looked up information on it. And all the information just blew me away - moving the backspace to capslock, even more balanced hands and all of the other important information inbetween.

Any way two weeks ago I remapped my backspace/capslock, redid (this time) a masking tape version of my keyboard letters, and a new keyboard chart. I began my training. This time not as gunho, I tried 20 minutes of straight typing 5 or 6 times in a day. I went through the stupid faze; between QWERTY, Dvarok, and Colemak my fingers and brain couldn't remember where they belonged. I'm slowly approaching the 'yes I am getting this' moment. I took a typing test last night and my results were 16 wpm no errors. I don't think that is to bad. It's half the speed I had before. I'll never win any typing records but I'm hoping that I will get better.

I'll finishing this up by saying, my letters (all of them, I can't stand to feel only some of them changed) are now are still homemade but made with lamanated paper and attached with permanate double sided tape. I'm still doing tutorials. My hands aren't cramping. Well lets put it this way my shoulders cramp way before anything else (30 to 40 minutes in). I am thinking about removing the QWERTY keyboard from my lap top totally. Windows 8 wants to always start up with the QWERTY keyboard so my password is allways wrong. I just need to find some nicer stickers for my gateway laptop, before I totally get rid of QWERTY. I've still some major issues to relearn. My fingers want the S and R keys to be switched. The E, I, and O keys sometimes get boggled. On some of the keys one hand is faster than the other one so letters gte switched. But these I feel will be fixed with more drills.

I do think I am going to have to invest in a mechanical keyboard, because the Colemak layout doesn't do anything for the spongy feeling of my HP keyboard. *Squish, Squish*

PS. I typed this with Colemak.