Where do I start?

You start by writing something. The first stories I really came up with were more like two or three minute scenes in a movie (two people fight with monsters in a forest clearing, a boy falls in love with a girl, something cool explodes). The idea is what brings you to the blank page. Every story starts as an idea. So the first step is to write as much about that idea as possible. What is the idea? Okay, what happened before the idea? What happened after the idea? How much detail can you write out about your idea? Once you've written all you can lean back in your chair and say these exact words, "This is total crap." No one else is going to say it to you in the beginning. They might say things like, "It's cool, but it's too much you," or, "So that's it? What happened before the story?"
Once you've admitted to yourself that what a pile of poo sits in front of you on a piece of paper, you've got some options. You end goal is to publish, right. So you can give it to someone to critique. Second, you can rewrite it. Third you can say screw it and send it to some kind of publishing entity. You can choose to do all three, and you can do them in whatever order you like. Mix it up. Get crazy. Whatever you choose, remember that in the end you want to send it somewhere. There's http://duotrope.com/. Search for a while, or pick a place to send something to and write for that particular publication.
"But my idea is for a novel," you say. Well, okay, you're novel will have chapters in it, right? So let's start with a chapter and move from there. Frank Herbert's Dune series started with a short story. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 series started with a short story called The Sentinal.

Rewriting. It sucks. It's hard to do because you really want your story to be right the first time. Rewriting sucks because you've gone from creating something to fixing something and you don't even know what's broken.

At this moment I'm listening to Brother Odd by Dean Koontz. I think I can say that I started the year with Playing for Pizza, John Grisham. So that begins the official book count of the year.

Methods

My first method of writing was the Idea. A scene would pop into my brain, and I would write that out. The problem is that one scene does not make a story, and you can write a thousand words for one scene. The two or three short stories I've written have really been simple scenes or a few scenes strung together, but there's no progression. Things happen, but nothing changes.
The scene merges with the method of streaming conscience. You sit down, you type, and then when you're done typing you have a story. When I read On Writing by Stephen King I got that idea. Just sit down kid, type until your fingers go numb, and you've got a story.
I listened to Robert McKee's book, Story. He makes the case for outlining, and Eric Nylund uses this method too. For now I'm going to dabble in some of both stream of conscience and outlining. I've got too many stories that aren't complete and will require major revisions for subsequent drafts.

Hierarchy

I'm listening to Robert McKee's book Story on cd. He puts together the hierarchy of a screenplay: beats > scene > sequence > act > story.