I enjoyed this story. It was easy to write because I didn't bother with notions like readability or being exciting. It has no immediate conflict and a weird protagonist and no other characters, not to mention being stilted and unedited. On the other hand, it weaves in concepts like powerful lizard-gods and the existence of strange, secret families whose access to a magical reality may or may not be genuine.
I have several stories in this vein, half-written or simply imagined. The idea is that an exaggerated belief in the predictability or controllability of chance events would be hard to distinguish from actual but low-grade magic, at least from the reader's point of view. If, further, everyone who believed this was in one large group like an extended family and had limited contact with the outside world, they would be more capable of maintaining strange beliefs.
One thing to avoid would be just making a cult. Not that this can't make for good fiction, but cults are dangerous to their members; they are malicious extensions of one person's will. The family we are looking for is essentially benign. Whatever trials and failures would be different in content but not in structure or intensity from most middle-class suburban families.
Herein lies my take on the old vampire story. I think, judged solely in terms of effective difference from most such stories, that it was a success. Humans use *their* blood- get it? It's frickin' brilliant. Even the reviewer who rejected it said so, so it must be true. Incidentally, I managed to miss the precise reason for farming vampires which I'd had in mind when the notion of the tale coalesced. Their blood is used, in very weak solutions, as an anti-aging serum for the rich.
The problems are many. For one thing, like most of my work, it isn't properly revised. I've copy-edited it, and I've made minor changes, but whenever I read it again after a pause I find things I would rather change or remove. It is definitely difficult to internalize the idea that I have to write, wait, edit, wait, edit, possibly until the sun explodes, or else I'll come up with less than ideal work. I wish online publications would just lower their standards for me, gee whiz.
But the main issue is the language. The speech is intended as late nineteenth-century upper-class English polite, and it's not a hundred thousand miles away. On the other hand- how would I know? I barely get by in early twenty-first century middle-class American. All of what I think I know on the subject comes from books and television, and much of that was produced by- Americans! Who became interested in Englishy stuff when, as teenagers they read books and watched television...
A reflection of a reflection of a reflection. But reflections are shiny, so it's not a complete waste of time.