7.02

     I finally finished my piece!  I have been working on it for almost 14 weeks.  That seems a little excessive.  I got it at over 300 wpm and 96% accuracy. I start my speedbuilding every day by writing difficult words from the piece five times each.  I don't take those words off the list until I finish the piece.  I wound up with 53 words for this piece, and I decided I can write all but 16 of them well enough now.  I’ve really been looking forward to not having to write all of those anymore.
     You may remember that I came up with a great brief for "breast cancer" earlier in the piece. It turned out it wasn't so easy to stroke, but the misstrokes didn't conflict with anything, so I didn't worry about it. I now have 38 entries for it, and I wrote it the right way over 5,100 times. I wound up with a final total of 35 entries for mammogram, but I only wrote that 1,300 times.

     My new piece seems like it’s going to be really hard, or at least the first minute is.  There are a lot of names.  It’s also at 235 wpm.  I slowed it down to the next highest speed, and it was 211 wpm.  I don’t want to drop down that low, so I guess I’m just stuck with 235.  Today was my first day with it and I got up to 173 wpm.  I had to slow it down to 140 in order to write it perfectly, though.

     I figured out which drill I missed in the book.  I only had a few drills left to check after that one, so I just went ahead and finished them, and tomorrow I go back to the ones I was really bad at.  I’ve been working on a new strategy with the book, which is to kind of read ahead and get ready for the words that are coming up instead of just letting them be a surprise.  It seems to be working well.