Excellent news. The people at Fish have sorted out the problem with my entry. The problem – as far as I can make out – seems to have been a twofold one.
First of all, there definitely seems to be some kind of issue with the “buy one entry, get one half price” offer. I know of at least one other person who has had a similar problem (although, for reasons related to the second part of the problem, they got their entry fixed a lot quicker than mine). The good news is that they appear to be going through all the “unpaid” entries by hand and sorting them out. (I don’t envy them having to do that.) However, if you have taken advantage of this offer, it might be worth checking your author page to see what the status of the second one is.
The second part of the problem was to do with my having two author accounts and e-mailing them from the address that was tied to the wrong one. For some reason, they don’t seem to be able to look up entries by using the name of the account (which I was giving them), or indeed by using the number of the entry (which I was also giving them). They can only look them up by using the e-mail address, which of course was the only piece of information that I was (implicitly) giving them that was wrong. The result of which was that I appeared to be banging on about a completely unrelated entry that was (a) paid for, (b) for a different competition and (c) several years old. They almost certainly assumed I was some kind of crank.
Many thanks to the people at Fish and also to those who helped behind the scenes.
The only thing is, after all that, I’m really not sure if the entry’s any good. But I guess it’s the principle that counts.