Random Monday: Garage Sales

This was meant for yesterday.... -_-

I don’t really know how others feel about this...but I love garage sales. Each year my little town has a town-wide garage sale in which we all prepare our year’s junk and sell it for another to find treasure. This year I sought out many things, things of which I didn’t know I would venture upon. Others crossed my path, having very much the same dilemma. I see garage sales as not only an opportunity for our little town to get rid of their junk, but also a day of great socialization.

Most of the time when I go out to garage sales, I go out with a minimal idea of what I want to find. I don’t ever really look for anything of worth. I seek out little, unique doohickeys for decoration. I examine them thoroughly before I buy them, and then I hope to garner ideas from them for a book project that might have been lackluster lately. For example, I happened upon a ship in a bottle that I hope to use for a design in one story. I found an amazing encyclopedia of mythology from Greece, the Celtic world, China... This is going to help me for ages to come.

Those aren’t the only things I look for. If I get lucky I seek out music, my music. I didn’t get lucky this year. I did last year, when I found the Titanic soundtrack. I also search for new books to read. There was a sale of nothing but free books that I came upon for this sale, so I was fortunate there.

Another odd thing I think about garage sales is that whenever you go out and look through a person’s things, you’re looking through a piece of their life that they’re willing to give away. When I bought the mythology encyclopedia, it was from a woman I realized was Wiccan when I found a number of books on writing spells and writing Books of Shadows. This did, admittedly, make me somewhat uneasy. I do know more about Wicca than I used to, so it wasn’t that bad. At another sale I could tell these people loved music and exercise. Why? There were three tables worth of CDs and CD holders; and about four pieces of exercise equipment there.

Garage saling is a seriously fun thing to do. One thing I did not expect to find was a sword. I love swords. There’s a reason they’re the most prominent weapon in my main series, the Flame Cycle! It was found at a friend’s house, so they didn’t worry about my age or whether I would be going insane and mass-murdering with it—they knew I liked swords. So now I own my second blade!

My conclusion: I enjoy the town-wide garage sale. It’s an opportunity to socialize, take a peek into someone’s life, to get some new items, to just spend money. (Admit it, you love to do it. We all do. It’s just that our wallets don’t.) But in this way you can see that everything I do will, in some way, relate back to my writing. I buy things in hopes that it will inspire something—maybe that sword will belong to a character someday. The ship will more than likely appear in a story. The dream catcher I bought might belong to another person as well.

Take every opportunity you have to do something like this. It’s an easy, cheap way to get countless ideas. And most of the time you get cheap snow cones too. (: