I prefer to burn in the rain myself. Besides lowering the unintentional fire danger, the rain also helps clean out the smoke IMO. I have 2 schools of thought.
1. Build a monster pile and set it on fire. This has a litle less physical work, but once it is lit, you don't have any real control of how it burns. I have had piles literally explode and heat damage nearby trees that I thought were plenty far away from how large I THOUGHT the fire would get. The last one I had do that had a pretty impressive 40' colum of flame. I inherited several massive piles on my property when I bought it. Some burnt well, and some were a twisted mass of large wood that had too much spacing to get to burn. Those I had to rip up and cut up with chainsaw and front end loader to get compact enough to dry out and burn. A large pile can also have problems with getting enough O2 and not combust completely(lots of smoke).
2. Pull from a stack/pile and insert into the burning pile as needed. This allows you to control the fuel the fire has access to. That means, that you can shut down this operation when ever you feel the need to, like it is getting dark and your monster pile is still cooking away and will require you to tend it till sometime past midnight. Leaving a fire unattended can net you a pretty big fine in most areas... It is nice to be able to shut it down when YOU want to. This method also allows you to place the fuel where it will burn the hottest and combust the cleanest.
I prefer method 2. And in almost all cases, it has proven to ultimately be faster and less hassle. Another thing that usually messes people up is the lack of oxygen and never really getting a good hot core fire. Flooding your neighborhood with smoke can make you really unpopular really fast, and is probably the biggest complaint about people burning. A good hot fire will have almost no smoke. I almost always use a blower now when I burn. It dosn't take much air to turn a smokey fire into a foaring blastfurnace with almost no smoke. It also burns a lot faster with added O2. The blower I use is not very large, in fact it is pretty tiny. It consists of a 12VDC 4" box fan from radio shack, a 12V 7AH gell cell battery salvaged from an old UPS, and a 3' length of 4" metal duct pipe. The blower/fan is attached to the end of the pipe with 4 little pieces of angle attached to the duct and blower mount holes with small nuts and bolts. The fully charged gellcell will run this thing for 24+ hours. The pipe is placed in near the center of the fire and blows a steady stream of fresh air into the middle of the fire. This makes a blast furnace effect that pushes the fuel quickly above the gas point with little smoke.
Good luck
