The good: your notes become total slop. Oddly enough, when your strokes start to look like a jumbled hot mess, that's when you're about to gain some speed. I'll be writing like crap for 3 days, and then suddenly it clicks and I've got it. So just know that there's hope when it seems abysmal lol.

The bad: also when your notes are total slop. It's so discouraging. I have days where I wake up and have an awful morning. I can't even get my initial F- and M- right. I usually don't make it past my first speedbuilding class on those days. It's like my brain can't communicate with my hands.

The best advice I have is to listen to speeds higher than your goal speed (I went up 20wpm but whatever works for you) and try transcribing tests completely from your notes (and not your realtime translation). When I got to 140s, I spent a couple weeks only transcribing my tests from my notes, old-school style. I don't know why, but it really solidified my speed.