There is not much to heating your house with a wood fireplace but I have a few pointers to share with you. The most important thing is:
Do NOT allow your wood to smolder! Smoldering wastes fuel and increases the risk of a chimney fire from creosote build-up. It also makes more work in cleaning the glass.
Charcoal is easier to ignite than wood so I use a metal kitty litter scoop to recover charcoal from the previous burn's ashes. Make sure that the overall length is shorter than the height of the fireplace. I scrape the ashes into a pile on one side the fireplace and then sift the ash into a metal bucket. The remaining charcoal is then placed into the other side of the fireplace. This is a dusty process so work slowly to keep the ash from flying out of the bucket. If you're cleaning out a hot fireplace, recovering the charcoal also helps to keep the ash bucket cooler.
Once the charcoal has been recovered, I make two long piles in the center of the fireplace (oriented front-to-back) and add short pieces of wood if necessary to raise the height of the piles. The long piles are to support longer pieces of placed side-to-side and the empty space between the two piles allows air to circulate under the wood and towards the back of the fireplace.
For starting a fire, I use waxed corrugated paper boxes from the grocery store. This paper is not recyclable so you're helping your local waste management by keeping this waste product out of the landfill. I place this paper in the empty area between the 2 charcoal piles. This helps to ignite the wood I've placed on the charcoal. As for igniting the fuel, I use a butane barbecue lighter but keep the wooden matches in case I run out of butane.
Depending upon your jurisdiction's recycling program, cooking grease can sometimes be recycled in green bins. I collect cooking grease in paper coffee cups stored in the freezer. Once the cup is full enough, I will put the grease cup onto the hot coals of the fireplace. You need hot coals to ensure that the grease burn immediately and not run down underneath the fireplace's refractory.
Sometimes a fire will die down and it just needs a good blast of air to restart. You can blow on the coals but it's better to use a bellows or blowpipe instead. We got our blowpipe from the historical artisans at the reenactment of the Siege of Fort Erie.