The only thing I can say here is just be sure to leave plenty of room around the larger pieces of wood when you add them... you need to allow the fire to continue to breath and not smother the fire. Make sure the fire is going good and small/medium-ish logs are fully engaged before going on to the bigger stuff.

I use those little fire starter bricks, newsprint, and kindling in my base... then a medium piece of wood... light and get it nice a toasty... then on with larger wood.

My firebox is on the small-ish size and I can't put huge pieces of wood on the fire, so I normally have medium pieces of wood and only put on the med/lg pieces when I have the fire good and hot.

Sadly, last time we had an inspection done, we were told we had a cracks in our tile liner and being that the water heater flu shares the chimney, the fireplace flu is too narrow to slide a replacement liner down in, which means rebuilding almost the entire thing in order to have a properly functional fireplace.

Sooooooooo... it remains dark until we can save the $$$.