Re: First crack at Photoshop
Well, the text is very nice. You may want to try this though....
First, take the text you have there. The grey lettering, not the fire effect on top of it. Make sure that's a separate layer.
Rasterize the layer (that makes it like a drawing, rather than text. It will no longer be able to be edited like text.)
Select the empty space around the text, and then select opposite.
Take the layer you added the fire effect to and play with it, making sure the highlighted area is always highlighted. This makes your text appear as some kind of distortion on top of whatever layer you effect it with.