The study of protection against failures in WDM optical networks plays strategic importance due to huge bandwidth of optical fiber. The p-Cycle is a novel protection approach based on pre-configured cycles to provide a fast recovery for single link failure. The optimal selection of cycles is the central problem to get a high protection performance of p-Cycle approach. In that sense, the importance of the length of a cycle for fast restoration is studied in this paper, because it affects directly the quality of restoration, therefore, the quality-of-service can be affected. This paper proposes a new heuristic approach and a new evaluation metric to solve the p-Cycle protection problem which simultaneously optimizes cost, protection, length and fairness of solutions in a mono-objective approach. Experimental results show a good performance of the heuristic proposed, when is compared with a recent Genetic Algorithms approach and the state-of-the-art ILP method.