If the wood you are picking up has dead bark on it, this can hold a lot of moisture and it can be worth while removing the damp bark from things that are thumb thick up to about wrist thick.
That is another reason that getting dead standing wood from 2 inches diameter and up and splitting it down. More surface area, and less surface dampness.
Am I right that you are in Washington State? Pacific rain forest country? I am just wondering what kind of trees you have around and whether any might offer good fire wood possibilities. Some places have birch, or ash, or spruce, or fat pine that can be good for use in a fire in their own ways.
One thing that a lot of people do is not use enough of each type of fuel. You don't want to just dump a load of sticks on the fire, so smothering it, but the temptation is often there to use as little tinder or kindling as you can. A 6 or 7 inch diameter tinder bundle is going to do a lot more to dry damp kindling than a 4inch bundle. Equally, having two 4 -5 inch bundles of dead twigs, all less than 1/4 inch diameter, and at least as long as from your finger tips to your elbow, will do more to dry the thumb and finger thick wood than just a handful of 8 inch twigs.
Use whatever wind you have available. At first you don't want it to blow the fire out, but soon you can use it to fan the flames and force dry that damper wood. In dry conditions I have seen logs of 8 to 10 inch diameter ignited with nothing more than waste paper and a strong, hot dry wind. When they burned down, fresh logs were lit just by pushing the old embers together and making a wind funnel of new logs around them.
If you lay your fire on a base of split wood this can help too. This gets the embryonic heart off damp ground, permits air to get under the fire more easily early on, and helps to create an ember bed without having larger bits of wood crushing down on the fire.
Good fuel/tinder/kindling doesn't exist everywhere. If you need fire often, but find a dearth of good materials in some places, think about collecting materials when you find them, then carrying them till needed. You can get some stuff to dry a bit by using body heat. This is mostly for tinder, rather than kindling, but if you find a really good bit of dead standing wood, you could cut some and take it with you to split down to jumpstart your fire later on.
Bigger fuel burns best when it has about a finger gap around it. Enough space for air flow, but still close enough that the heat radiated from one surface gets to heat its neighbor. The joke is that the experienced woodsman kicks a sickly fire and it blazes up, the greenhorn kicks the fire and it promptly goes out. This is to do with spacing.
Best of luck!
