THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE!
One night I was listening to Leroy Anderson's 'The Typewriter' and I was thinking that I should dust off my old 1920's Underwood, and maybe oil it. Sometime later that night, in my sleepiness-induced delerium, the thought crossed my mind of the description of keystrokes being used as a sexual innuendo. For some reason, I kept thinking of typewriter-related innuendos, and then it dawned on me that this was a pony fic a-brewing. Question is, which pony would suit this story? I had considered Applejack, it would be easy to make her out to be the closet-literary type. But Dashie was so much more ready for the role. She's already a hard-core Daring Do fangirl... fanfilly? And she actually has mentioned - in the show - that she writes stories (S3 E9). Might've been a bit of a joke, but it's not a far stretch to assume she'd write some Daring Do fanfiction. Plus, Dashie has that reputation complex, wanting to look like the awesomest pony in town to everyone. That works both ways, she could just as easily be embarassed about buying personal toys as she would be about buying a typewriter.
As for the whole 'used' thing, obviously a thing with adult toys. But not so much with a typewriter, you might say. Well, I once had a friend who compared owning a used car to using a used condom. Some people are just picky about stuff like that, and not necessarily germophobes. I have, of course, heard of ashamed kids buying used toys on ebay. Which genuinely does disgust me. Hence that whole bit in the story. That's just nasty. Like... buying used underwear, but worse.
Actually that whole schtick influenced the part of the story about Rainbow not wanting to put a return address on the envelope. Hehe. And the idea that the manufacturer's name is abbreviated is also part of that. I suppose the goal of buying used toys is for kids using their parents' credit cards, and not wanting 'DRAGON DILDO' showing up on a statement. I'm not sure of the actual name they use, but I'm pretty sure Bad Dragon is marked under something along the lines of 'Dragon, Inc.' Which is something professional looking and not... implicative.
The section with the mail order catalog, or rather the vast selection therein, came to me when I randomly looked up my Underwood typewriter on ebay, for pricing. Apparently, it isn't worth a whole lot :/ While searching ebay listings, I actually came across a bunch of strange and bizarre models. Most notably, an otherwise normal model that had an extremely wide carriage, meant for 3 foot wide paper. And also, a smaller 'portable' model that typed in cursive font. Those kind of blew my mind, I guess I never really looked into typewriters before. And, of course, that matches up quite well with all the crazy adult toys that exist.
The lubrication innuendo spawned directly from me considering oiling my own typewriter. Which would probably be a pain.
The ending reveal actually took some thinking. It was probably the last part of the story that I conceived. I didn't really know how to deliver it. I was originally going to just have it say, 'she typed "once upon a time..." ' hence the name of the chapter. But then, I realized, I'll just do what I do best: put an obnoxiously large paragraph space, to force a pause. A lot of readers despise my long breaks. But they get the job done.
By the way, I own a couple typewriters, yes, but I've honestly never actually typed anything of any importance on one. I'm not some hard-core literary nerd who prefers using a mechanical typewriter. MS Word is the way to go, in my opinion. (Although I am a bit picky about my computer keyboard.) Truthfully, I appreciate typewriters as mechanical marvels more than anything, and I'm hardly a collector.