Do professional authors still cackle and kick their feet while thinking about things to inflict on the characters?

Hmm. I can't speak for others, but I don't go in for the cackling too much, as a rule. I may be kind of an outlier in this regard, admittedly... but once you've been doing this work more or less constantly for twenty or thirty or forty years (and I'm coming up on fifty years of this, now), you'll increasingly have it borne in on you—if you're at all observant—that what pain you inflict on your…