lots of reasons your bidding might have slowed. but here's an idea, and it's actually not easy to do given what creatures of habit we are: try new, but not totally different, categories. often ebay seems to offer us only the chance to buy things that fall within our obvious preferences, but if you think of it as more of a store (whatever your favorite kind of store is) and imagine yourself wandering around and sort of stumbling on interesting things, then you might make discoveries. one way to do this is the classic slight change of name in the search space - add an "s", list "bronze" instead of "brass", try "deco" instead of just "glass", whatever. all this may be obvious but there it is.
allen