@Spinifex:
Indeed, I saw it at hi-game chat area, and yes its true that in general people become despondent when they are unable to do things they used to be capable of and took for granted before. I actually did not become despondent because I have learned the hard way (sickness) that nothing comes easy and you have to be persistent and consistent in your plan, which is practicing in this case, but I guess it is difficult to abide by a schedule especially if you have a small  toddler asking for your attention all the day, as in your case :). I sill believe though that if you devoted more time you can reach your original speed within a month or two, but it is difficult to find time in this busy world, and hopefully some day we will not need keyboards any more with proper speech recognition software or maybe mental signals tracking.

@erw and @pafkata90.

1word = 5 chars
1word/1second = 5 chars per 1 second
60 word/ minute = 60 *5chars / minute = 60 * 5chars/ 60 second = 5 chars per second.
I hope I am right :).

Honestly I was thinking before pfkata90 reply if they count the space and the new line characters in writing. I think it does not make sense to count them, but to be fair in comparison between Typing and handwriting I think they should be counted because I guess they are counted when determining your typing speed, at least in the program that I use.

I just measured my hand writing and it was 20-21 WPM (didn't count spaces) for both longhand and block letters. 35 seems pretty high.

Indeed it is. I wanted to clarify the issue so I used some of my old java code to write a quick application that calculates the writing speed, the number of character written and the time. It calculates the writing speeds with or without the space included. I tested my writing speed with somewhat difficult text from CNN. I scored 20.6 WPM ( without taking space into account) and 24.6 after taking space into account, but I was really tired from typing and I was almost asleep. Also, I wrote with my usual pig font characters, however, I will try later my faster scheme where I write using small font words and a relatively tighter or closer to each other characters , and I think I can reach 30 WPM provided I let my hand wrest for a while. If anybody would like to try the application you can find the links here.

https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1048

I have created some lessons or sets for the words that I used to find difficult and I remember when I practiced the first 6 sets for one day, I jumped by 5WPM. You can try them, maybe they will be helpful. I used to find set 4 and 5 to be the most difficult and although I typed at some point 50 WPM, I was never able to g; above 30WPM for these sets.

https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1047

Wow, great progress.

For 5 minutes typing +1WPM is already a good improvement, so +3WPM means excellent effort on your typing skills.

nimbostratue: may I ask how you changed the keyboard layout in Mavis Beacon?  I've tried to do it but can't figure it out.